I have never been particularly gifted at reading maps, which is how I found myself reversing down a narrow lane outside Pineto with a hire car full of suitcases, two children asking if we were lost, and my partner muttering something about satellite navigation being the greatest con of the modern age. The sat nav had cheerfully announced our arrival at a point that was, in fact, a field containing one very unbothered goat. The goat looked at me. I looked at the goat. Neither of us felt especially confident about the situation.

Twenty minutes of increasingly tense countryside wandering later, we found the actual property down a gravel track lined with umbrella pines that looked exactly like every Italian holiday brochure I had ever dismissed as too perfect to be real. The Villa Pineto, as the booking confirmation kept calling it, sat there in late afternoon sun with terracotta walls and green shutters that had seen better decades but wore their age rather well. I immediately forgave the goat everything.

The key was in a lockbox, which sounds straightforward until you realise the code had been written on a scrap of paper that had lived in my wallet since Gatwick and now resembled a tobacco stain with numbers. I tried three combinations before my daughter pointed out I was holding it upside down. The door opened with a satisfying creak that suggested genuine history rather than theatrical effect, and we stepped into a hallway that smelled of pine cleaner and something else I could not place but later identified as the ghost of a thousand previous family dinners.

The kitchen was the first room to properly announce itself. Terracotta tiles underfoot, wooden cabinets that did not quite close unless you spoke nicely to them, and a window overlooking a garden where bougainvillea had clearly won some long-running territorial dispute. My son immediately claimed the smallest bedroom based entirely on its balcony, which he described as "strategic" for reasons he refused to clarify. I suspect he had spotted the outdoor table football from up there.

I will be honest about the bathroom situation. There was one bathroom for five of us, which my partner and I had optimistically thought would encourage family togetherness. What it actually encouraged was a queueing system that rapidly became more organised than anything in our actual home life. By day three we had established a rota. By day four we were genuinely proud of this.

The garden proved to be where we spent most of that first evening, sitting on slightly wobbly chairs with wine from the Coop in Pineto town and watching the light change over the pine trees. The children discovered the barbecue was roughly the size of a small car and began making increasingly ambitious plans for it. I discovered that the outdoor light switch was in a location that made absolutely no logical sense and spent several minutes feeling along walls like a burglar before finding it behind a potted olive tree.

What struck me most, lying in bed that first night with unfamiliar creaking sounds and the distant smell of someone else's woodsmoke, was how quickly the panic of the wrong turn and the key code and the bathroom logistics had settled into something else entirely. The villa was not polished. The WiFi worked in approximately two corners of the property. The washing machine had opinions about which cycles it would complete without protest. But it felt properly inhabited, properly itself, in a way that somewhere designed purely for tourists never quite manages.

I fell asleep planning a trip to the beach the next morning, Pineto's famous sandy stretch being apparently walkable if you were enthusiastic enough, and woke to my son already on his strategic balcony in pyjamas, watching mist lift off the pines with the patience of someone who had never once worried about a lockbox code in his life.