You stand below the hill-top sanctuary and lighthouse as in the bows of a ship, where two seas meet. Up the cliff the monumental staircases ascend, one labelled REX, the other DUX. A Byzantine copy of the original Roman column stands at their top, like an exclamation mark, at the terminus of the Apulian Aqueduct.

‘A suggestive cataract’, says the promotional literature of 1939, ‘is conducted to the terminal fountain, which forces stentorian torrents of water from its base’. No longer. The staircase is arid and forlorn, the famous aqueduct which runs underground from Caposele in Campania, 200 km away, with its 2,500 km of piping to water 360 towns and villages, is dried up by the time it reaches here. Puglia’s thirst has increased faster than the system can slake it.

Legend says the hill-top sanctuary is the spot to which St Peter will come to open the gates of Paradise. Down on the shore, all round the promontory, the sea has eaten into grottoes of fantastic shape which look as though they might lead to somewhere quite different. You can enter them by small boat from the holiday hamlets at the water’s edge, anywhere between Punta Ristola and the Marina di Novaglie.