If there’s a grocers in the labyrinth of Matera’s old town, we didn’t find it. Sunday evening, twelve hours after we woke up to go to the airport, and I was roaming the newer streets of the city for something simple to cook. Pasta, tomatoes, perhaps an onion, perhaps some herbs.

Sunday evening in Matera and the sky was softening into ice cream colours after the cloudless blue of the day. I was beyond the realm of the tourists here: Matera not as attraction, but as city near the arch of Italy’s boot, with compact little cars lining the streets and yellow-striped awnings closing apartments off from the early autumn heat. A serious little church, the date 1649 carved above the door, held two elderly men at prayer. Traffic signs and a half-eaten roll filled with cured meat left on a parking metre, whether in abandonment or charity I don’t know. I suddenly felt very aware of wearing too few clothes.

The Carrefour express was shut. The grocers shuttered up. I turned a corner as a final attempt and saw a group of middle-aged men standing outside an open doorway. They were drinking but this wasn’t a bar - shelves lined the walls, florescent lighting hung from the ceiling. As I walked through the men I was greeted by a deli counter, a couple and a younger boy behind it. Here I could find something simple to cook, in possibly the only open shop in the city.

Another man came forward and greeted me, handed me a red plastic basket. I picked up vine tomatoes and a couple of nectarines and he steered me back to the scales in the corner, put them gently into white paper bags and exchanged numbers with the man behind the counter. I picked up a handful of cut basil, wrapped in a page from a magazine. I self-consciously assessed the wall of pasta, thinking of the parts in Stanley Tucci’s Taste and Rachel Roddy’s An A-Z of Pasta where the school of pairing the correct shape with the correct sauce was laid down, but forgetting any of their teachings. When I added a bar of chocolate to the basket at the counter the basket man warned me off it, directed me to another, presumably superior, bar instead. 

I love a foreign supermarket. My childhood holidays took place on campsites in the South of France and Spain, and a stop at the supermarket always marked the beginning of one. My siblings and I would form our own traditions, of blowing up the filmy plastic gloves provided to select produce with and hitting one another with them; of weighing the fruit and pasting the sticker on the bags; of ogling, mildly terrified, at the gory specimens in the butchers’ counter. There’s an endless game of spot-the-difference to be found here, a unique delight in being able to pick what you like, because you are on holiday, bound up in the unbridled delight borne of being encouraged to choose a packet of European biscuits (BN, or Principe, nothing else compares). It’s the novelty, I think, of doing something so ordinary when you’re meant to be escaping everyday life.

I went grocery shopping near the end of our holiday pancake - the first day of a holiday during which, I’ve learned, it’s better to lower expectations and relish what will unfold instead - and I had only recently learned of Matera’s astonishing history. Within my father’s lifetime the city - two sprawling ravines of sassi, or caves that had been lived and worked in since pre-history - had been re-discovered by modernity and the 20,000 living there in poverty evacuated by the government.

After decades of abandonment the sassi have largely been redeveloped and the people - and tourists - moved back in. Around a quarter of Matera’s housing stock can now be found in AirBnb. Wandering these streets, built upon in layers over the centuries, I was conscious of two things: how the cobbles have been made slippery-smooth by others’ feet over millennia, and how we were occupying white-washed dwellings that were once the sight of such artistry and, later, such suffering. 

I returned to the tiny kitchen in our AirBnb with something simple to cook. M boiled the kettle, his thighs brush the gathered curtain beneath the unit that holds a sink and a hob, and I settled the baby to sleep. We sat on the balcony and ate the wrong-shaped pasta and watched waiters in waistcoats dash around tables at the restaurant on the other side of the sassi. From here we were both hidden and on show, out of sight of the couples who walk along the street beneath us but fully displayed to those at other balconies opposite. We are tourists, we blow in and out of here 48 hours later, onto the next town, our phones holding the photos. We are packing lightly, but I took the half-empty bag of pasta and the remaining tomatoes when we left.