Why Puglia makes a great off-season Italian escape

We cycle back to the hotel in a neat line, spokes whirring, weaving through a patchwork of silver-green olive groves. In flat fields uninterrupted by high-rises or clunky machinery, the odd worker toils by hand in the evening sun, maintaining the grids of knarled, ancient trees, some with trunks as thick as oil drums.

Skimming into the ivory-stone courtyard, we hand our bikes to a waiting attendant and slink off to the pool, bagging loungers next to none other than Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville. My partner and I lazily raise our heads from our loungers as we spot him, but it’s no big shock. Of course Hugh’s here. He was across from us at the beach club yesterday.

Olive groves, cycling jaunts, beach clubs, celebs – this is Puglia, sometimes known as Apulia, the swathe of farmland and craggy coast that makes up the “heel” of Italy’s boot-shaped land mass. Recommendations for this chunk of Italy have simmered and swirled for years now among the most clued-up travellers, but the region has really come into its own in the past three years; magazine covers featured its unspoiled green pastures and distinctive, conical trulli houses.

Travel publications named it the “it” destination for the jet set. Moneyed Brits booked destination weddings and honeymoons. Before I fly off to it, one travel industry figure warns me, sombrely, against visiting in still-peak September. “There are more Americans there than ever before,” they say, ominously, insinuating that this is what signifies the death knell for a cool destination.

Perhaps we got lucky, but Hugh was the only trace of global starriness we found in mid-September Puglia. What hit me more was the spellbound sleepiness of the place: cycling between its masserias (charming old farmhouses given new life by hoteliers and restaurateurs), you could hear actual birdsong. Far from pumping chillout tunes, its beach clubs were largely shut up, lapped by frisky autumn waves.

The lilt of life here is seductively easy to slip into: you spend parts of your days relaxing at character-packed, rustic-chic hotels with lovely pools, and are seemingly only ever half an hour’s cycle away from a gorgeous whitewashed village or an Instagram-worthy swimming cove.