I have to admit, my arrival in Roseto degli Abruzzi did not go quite to plan. Somewhere between Pescara airport and the town centre, I managed to leave my phone in the back of a taxi, which meant I spent a good forty minutes wandering around with a crumpled printout of directions, trying to locate our holiday flat by matching the photograph of the balcony to actual buildings. The photo had been taken on a bright day. It was now overcast. Every balcony in Roseto, I discovered, looks faintly similar when you are panicking slightly and in need of a wee.

I found the place eventually, mostly because a small man in a navy boiler suit emerged from a garage and simply pointed at the correct door without my asking. His name, I later learned, was Enzo. He did not speak. He just pointed, nodded once, and returned to whatever mysterious business he had been conducting among his spanners. I never saw him again, but his silent intervention felt almost spiritual.

The flat itself was on the third floor of a pale peach building with terracotta trim, the sort of understated Italian architecture that makes British seaside towns look like they gave up halfway through. I dumped my bags and immediately went in search of provisions, which is how I met Signora Ferretti at the alimentari on Via Nazionale. She was perhaps seventy, with hair the colour of strong tea and an apron that had seen active service since the 1980s. I asked for mozzarella. She asked where I was staying. I told her. She pursed her lips, said "Ah, the peach building," in a tone that suggested she knew its entire history, and then spent twenty minutes explaining why the mozzarella I had chosen was acceptable but the one in the back fridge was superior, if I was prepared to wait while she fetched it. I waited. We discussed her nephew in Manchester, whom she had never visited because "the food there, poverino, he eats sandwiches for lunch." She said this with genuine sorrow.

That evening I took a stroll along the lungomare, the promenade that runs parallel to the Adriatic. The beach was quiet, being early May, and I found a bench occupied by a man called Domenico who was feeding crumbs to an extremely bold seagull he had named Giuseppe. Domenico was retired from the railway, he told me, and came to this bench every evening to "supervise the sunset." He spoke excellent English, which he attributed to forty years of reading detective novels. "Agatha Christie," he said, "taught me everything. Also, she made me suspicious of everyone, which is useful." He eyed my empty hands. "You have no wine. This is wrong." He produced a plastic cup from his jacket pocket and poured me a measure from a flask that had definitely not started the day full. It was Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, rough and honest and somehow perfect. We sat in companionable silence as Giuseppe the seagull attempted to steal his spectacles.

The next morning I encountered the flat's caretaker, a brisk woman called Patrizia who arrived to explain the washing machine. She spoke rapidly and exclusively in Italian, of which I understand approximately enough to order food and apologise. The washing machine, she made clear through a combination of mime and mild exasperation, was not to be used after ten in the evening because "the noise, the neighbours, they are sensitive." She demonstrated the correct detergent quantity by holding up her thumb and forefinger in a precise gap that I suspect I will never replicate. Before leaving, she asked if I was alone. I said yes. She looked at me with what I can only describe as complicated Italian pity, then pressed two tomatoes into my hand from her own bag. "For lunch," she said. "You need feeding."

I spent three days in Roseto degli Abruzzi, and I spoke to more strangers in that short time than I might manage in a month back in Leeds. There was the baker who refused to let me buy just one cornetto because "what if you want another?" There was the elderly man in the piazza who corrected my pronunciation of "grazie" by repeating it at me seventeen times with increasing theatricality. There was a teenager called Marco who worked at the gelateria and confessed, in a whisper, that he preferred English custard to any Italian dessert, a secret he clearly considered dangerous.

I came to Roseto expecting a quiet beach holiday and perhaps some decent seafood. I found instead a small town absolutely stuffed with people who seemed genuinely interested in whether I was enjoying myself, eating properly, and had understood the washing machine. It was disconcerting and rather wonderful. I am not sure I would have met any of them if I had not lost my phone in that taxi, if I had not been forced to look up and around rather than down at a screen. There is probably a lesson there, though I suspect Enzo in his garage would simply point silently rather than articulate it. I am already planning my return, and this time I shall leave my phone at home deliberately.