I have never been more grateful for a sat nav than I was at half eleven at night, crawling through the backstreets of Trani with a hire car the size of a small canal boat and a bladder that was absolutely not going to make it to morning. My partner Dave had insisted we stop for "one quick coffee" in Bari, which turned into three coffees, a plate of taralli we did not need, and a leisurely chat with a man called Vito who sold us lemons we still do not know what to do with. By the time we reached Trani, it was properly dark, the streets had narrowed to what I can only describe as "ambitious," and I was doing that thing where you breathe through your teeth and pray nobody is coming the other way.

The trullo was down a lane that felt less like a road and more like a suggestion. I clipped a wing mirror on an olive tree that had probably been there since the Romans and let out a noise that Dave later described as "like a seagull being trodden on." We found the key safe, eventually, after some creative torch work and me dropping the code on the gravel three times. The door creaked open and there it was: a proper Puglian trullo, all conical roofs and whitewashed stone, smelling faintly of lavender and old plaster.

I will be honest, my first thought was not poetic. My first thought was that I needed the loo and that the bedroom ceiling was a very strange shape. But standing there in the kitchen the next morning, bleary-eyed and clutching the worst coffee I have ever made myself, the whole thing suddenly clicked. The light came through that little round window in a way that made everything look like a film set. Dave went outside in his socks to look at the almond tree and immediately stood on something spiky. I laughed for a solid minute. He did not.

By ten we had ventured out, still slightly dazed, and that is when the characters started appearing. First was Signora Rizzo from next door, who materialised over the low stone wall like a friendly spectre and immediately began telling us, in rapid Italian and expressive hand gestures, that we had parked poorly, that her nephew made better wine than the stuff in the supermarket, and that we must come for coffee. We understood approximately none of this and agreed enthusiastically to all of it. She produced a bowl of fresh figs from somewhere, pressed them into my hands, and vanished back over the wall.

The baker in town was a man called Gino who had opinions about bread that I can only describe as evangelical. I asked for a focaccia and received a ten-minute lecture on the correct hydration of dough, a free slice of something with tomatoes that he called "the real one," and a firm instruction never to put cheese on it. "You are not in Rome," he said, with the gravity of a man discussing international law. I promised I would not. He seemed only partially convinced.

That evening we walked down to the harbour, partly to escape the heat and partly because Dave had developed an obsession with seeing the cathedral by night. We got slightly lost, because of course we did, and ended up in a tiny square where an old man was sitting on a plastic chair outside his door, feeding bits of bread to a cat that clearly considered him beneath its notice. His name was Pasquale. He spoke no English. We spoke barely any Italian. And yet somehow, through pointing and laughing and him doing an impression of a tourist taking a bad photograph, we spent forty-five minutes in his company and left with directions to a restaurant he claimed was "for people who eat properly."

He was not wrong. The owner, a woman called Lucia with hair the colour of the Aperol she poured, took one look at us and decided we needed feeding aggressively. She brought dishes we had not ordered, explained them with theatrical patience, and sat down at our table at one point to demonstrate the correct way to twist orecchiette on a knife. "You," she said, pointing at Dave, "you eat like a child. I will fix this." He ate three bowls. She seemed satisfied.

Walking back to the trullo that night, full and slightly wine-happy, Dave turned to me and said something unexpectedly serious. He said he had spent the whole year worrying about work and money and whether we should have done something more impressive for our holiday, somewhere farther, somewhere with more to show for it. And then he said that Pasquale had probably never worried about any of that in his life, and that maybe there was something in sitting on a plastic chair feeding a cat you pretended not to like.

I did not have a good answer. I still do not. But I think about it sometimes, when I am stressed and rushing about, and I remember the way the light came through that round window, and the way Lucia said "you eat like a child," and the way Signora Rizzo appeared and disappeared like a fig-bearing wizard. We went back the next morning and parked even worse, just to see if she would come back. She did. She brought more figs. She did not mention the parking. Some things, I suppose, are their own kind of perfect.