I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I missed the turning for Caramanico Terme by a good fifteen miles, distracted by a roadside sign advertising pecorino cheese. By the time I realised my error, I was halfway up a mountain road that grew narrower with every bend, my hire car's GPS cheerfully insisting I make a U-turn "when possible." The possibility, I discovered, would not arrive for another forty minutes of white-knuckle reversing and muttered apologies to startled goats.

When I finally rolled into Caramanico Terme, clutching the steering wheel like a man who'd survived something significant, the village greeted me with that particular hush of Italian hill towns in late afternoon. My holiday property sat perched on the edge of things, a solid stone house with terracotta tiles and a view that immediately made the goat encounter feel worthwhile. I stood on the terrace with a warm beer from my hastily purchased emergency supplies, watching the Maiella mountains turn gold in the fading light, and felt something in my shoulders finally release.

The kitchen, I discovered that first evening, was properly equipped in the way that makes British cooks simultaneously excited and intimidated. No kettle, naturally. A moka pot that looked like it had witnessed several decades of faithful service. I attempted coffee the next morning with the confidence of someone who had watched approximately two YouTube tutorials, and produced something that was either terribly authentic or completely ruined, depending on your generosity of spirit. I drank it on the terrace, feeling very continental, pretending the bitterness was intentional.

The local market in Caramanico Terme operates with splendid irregularity that I never quite mastered, appearing in the piazza on certain mornings with no discernible pattern I could detect. I stumbled upon it by accident, rounding a corner to find elderly women sorting through crates of tomatoes with the seriousness of jewellery appraisers. I bought bread from a baker who communicated entirely through gestures and approving grunts, selecting a loaf that proved to be still warm, the crust shattering satisfyingly when I tore into it on a nearby bench. Some local cheese, a paper-wrapped parcel of sliced mortadella, and figs that were so ripe they were practically apologising for themselves. Lunch became an impromptu picnic of tremendous satisfaction, eaten with my fingers like a person who had forgotten all civilised behaviour.

The village's small bars became my evening ritual, though "ritual" suggests more planning than I actually managed. I would wander down from the house as the heat began to soften, finding whichever establishment had chairs in the last of the sunshine. Aperitivo hour in Abruzzo is not the elaborate constructed performance you find in Milan or Rome. Here it is a modest glass of something bitter and local, perhaps a few olives or crisps that appear without ceremony. I became fond of a particular corner bar where the proprietor seemed faintly amused by my attempts to order in Italian, gently correcting my pronunciation without quite letting on that he was doing so.

My cooking experiments in that kitchen grew bolder as the days passed, though "bolder" is perhaps generous. I attempted pasta e ceci one evening, having eaten something magnificent in a trattoria in the lower village. The chickpeas from the market were excellent. My execution was... educational. The resulting dish sat somewhere between soup and stew, entirely wrong but completely edible. I ate it on the terrace with more of the local wine, which was rough and honest and somehow perfect with my culinary failure. There is something about eating your own inadequate cooking in a beautiful place that becomes its own particular pleasure.

The butcher in the village became a familiar face, or at least I became a familiar confused Englishman to him. I would point at things with what I hoped was appropriate enthusiasm, receive packages wrapped in white paper, and discover their contents only upon unwrelling back at the house. This system produced a memorable lamb chop of tremendous quality, grilled simply with rosemary from a pot on the terrace, and a sausage that proved to contain something I preferred not to identify but enjoyed enormously nonetheless.

My final evening, I managed to secure a table at a small restaurant I had walked past a dozen times, always finding it closed or full or mysteriously both simultaneously. The meal was unhurried and generous, handmade pasta with a wild boar ragu that tasted of the mountains themselves, wine from a local vineyard that the owner poured with evident pride. I walked back to the house afterwards in darkness, slightly unsteady, the village cats watching me with professional disinterest from doorways.

I left Caramanico Terme with a jar of local honey, a half-empty bottle of amaro, and the certain knowledge that I would miss that kitchen and its moka pot more than was reasonable. Some holidays give you perfect experiences. Others give you imperfect ones in perfect settings, which turns out to be much the same thing in the end.