I arrived in Bari on a Tuesday morning with no onward reservation. This was deliberate. For twenty years I had been travelling with itineraries — the product of research, of forums, of a chronic inability to tolerate uncertainty. I am, by profession and disposition, a man who reads menus before entering restaurants. Puglia was an experiment.

The first two days were uncomfortable in a way I had not expected. Without the scaffolding of a plan, I became hyperaware of time — its quantity, its passage, its potential for waste. On the morning of the third day, sitting in a bar in Alberobello with a coffee I had not chosen and a newspaper I could not read, I noticed that I was not thinking about what to do next. I was simply there.