"This is the greatest place on earth to live," he said. "The air is so pure, first it comes across the Sahara, then across the sea...it's clean, scrubbed and washed, and the olive oil from these trees is the best in the world."

He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me through his house, up narrow stairs and through simple rooms. "Any time you wanna come back, you come back...we'll sit here and talk for ever."

We parted company in his courtyard and I asked him to translate one of his poems for me and he read it off the wall: "I am alone in bent old age, worn thin by loneliness. Now it is time to go, so I wish you good health, and be fair and just in all you do."

The next day I journeyed on, heading for the end of the peninsular, the southernmost part of mainland Greece: Akri Tenaro, a place my old school atlas had insisted on calling Cape Matapan, and that's how I still thought of it - Matapan. As a schoolboy of 15 the name had fascinated me, such a ring there was to it - a faraway location that I had to visit, just so that I might stand at the end of Europe and stare out across the sea towards Africa.

"According to legend the entrance to Hades is down there," old Nondas had told me, "and the ancient Greeks always said that those who set sail to round the cape should say a last farewell to their wives and children. So be careful. Them old gods and goddesses are still on the prowl, up to no good, stirring up mischief."

The Mani is perhaps the strangest part of the Peloponnese, the coast ragged and rough with the land lying along by the sea like great slabs of muscle. "A wild and sparsely populated country, threatened by bleak grey mountains," my guidebook said, "and inhabited by warlike men, harder than the stones around them..."

In time these warlike men formed themselves into clans and tribes and fought each other for a barren land that was too poor to support them all. They fortified their houses, too, making towers of them, 50 to 80ft high and, from these strongholds, they carried on their vendettas until they or their rivals were vanquished. Now these crumbling towers can be seen on almost every hilltop, sometimes solitary, sometimes gathered into tiny villages, half-abandoned, dark and forbidding.

Yet I found Areopolis, the local capital, a cheerful town when I got there. In the old quarter the church bell was ringing and I found a room in one of the converted towers. In the garden two old ladies moved their chairs to follow the shade; talking slowly because they had all the time in the world, but never stopping in case they hadn't.

Music drifted into the house from behind the church, where 20 or 30 children were playing their bazookis under the direction of a music master. On the square, where I ate later, a dozen men were watching a televised football match, the set and the chairs spread across the street, forcing passing cars to weave gently among the spectators. A man bursting with bonhomie brought my dinner, his enormous smile half-hidden behind a Cretan moustache.

"I am the Maradonna of the souvlaki," he announced and banged down a bottle of wine by way of emphasis, the noise in no way troubling the pack of scrawny cats who prowled beneath my table, hungry enough to gnaw the shoes off my feet. I threw some meat to them, by way of propitiation, and poured a glass of wine. For a town that is named after Ares, a god of war, Areopolis was decidedly welcoming: the Maniots have mellowed.

So I drove on southwards, over the empty hillsides where the endless stone walls made aimless snail trails up to the horizon; a stone crop in a stony land. At Harouda I turned towards the sea, into a road that became a track and led me to a small Byzantine chapel, one of the many.

I pushed at an iron gate and let myself into a small graveyard where the sun burnt fiercely off the white marble crosses. I passed by the side of the church and came into a walled courtyard where six tall pine trees gave a generous shade and a stone coping made chair and table for my picnic: bread, cheese, tomatoes, melon, and a red wine grown hot in the car; not so much chambre as mulled.