The joy of falling in love on a farm in Italy while England win a World Cup

You’ll find Ostuni at the ankle end of Puglia, the heel of Italy,about five miles inland from the swaggering, frankly show-off turquoise-ness of the Adriatic. Sat atop a rocky outcrop that peers down on the flat carpet of olive farms below, Ostuni is one of those places you see sploshed all over the travel supplements of a weekend newspaper. Skies bluer than blood in a Bowes-Lyon vein contrasting with artful stacks of white-washed buildings – it’s not called la città bianca for nothing. There’s a citadel. Check. An old town. Check. It has hazardous marble cobbles coming out of its ears.

The surrounding countryside is dotted with masseria, grand old farmhouses that date back to the 16th century, many of which have been converted into accommodation for visiting tourists. In the grounds of one, in a wooden hut nestled away under the shade of a near 3,000-year-old olive grove, I fell back in love. With cricket*.

My girlfriend “T” and I had jacked in our jobs at the end of 2018, tired of London and life. Sticking one straight in the eye of Samuel Johnson, we sub-let our flat and went in search of adventure. Ending up at the end of the earth. Or near enough. In the first part of 2019, we hiked glaciers in Argentinian Patagonia, yomped around the Torres del Paines in Chile, gazed at waterfalls in Iguazu (Did they film Moonrakerhere? Yep) and were violently sick in Colombia, a chapter filed away in the recesses of my mind under the heading The Hostel in Medellín.

After a few months of backpacking, the vast expanses of South America started to take their toll. Wearied by 48-hour bus journeys, terrifying internal flights and the malaise of our peripatetic and, let’s be honest, largely pointless existence, we decided to find a