I have never been so grateful for a pair of walking boots in all my life, and I say that as someone who once wore flip-flops to a wedding in Wales. The journey to our holiday home in Metaponto had been the sort of comedy of errors that would make a decent short film, provided nobody had to watch me trying to navigate a hire car through Italian country lanes while my partner read directions from a phone that kept switching to a language we think might have been Romanian.

The mishap came at a petrol station somewhere near Potenza. I had confidently marched inside, announced "pieno" with the pride of a man who once got a B in GCSE French, and proceeded to fill the tank with diesel. Our little Fiat ran on petrol. The resulting twenty minutes of gesticulation, apology, and a rather expensive call to the rental company set us back two hours and most of my dignity. We arrived at the property after dark, hungry, slightly smelling of fuel, and in no mood for the romantic stroll along the beach I had promised.

Morning, though, morning was something else. I threw open the shutters to sunshine that felt almost aggressive in its brightness, the kind of light that makes you squint and apologise to your own eyeballs. The garden of our place was all olive trees and that particular dusty green you only seem to get in southern Italy, and beyond it I could see the Ionian Sea doing its best impression of a postcard. We had planned, you see, to spend our first day walking. Nothing ambitious, just a gentle hike through the coastal countryside, perhaps a picnic, definitely some smug photographs for people back in drizzly Britain.

The weather had other ideas.

By the time we had located our walking boots and a map that appeared to have been drawn by an optimistic child, the sky had turned the colour of a bruised plum. The first drops fell as we reached the gate. Fat, warm, insistent drops that rapidly became a downpour of almost biblical enthusiasm. We retreated to the covered terrace and watched our hiking plans dissolve along with the path we had intended to follow.

This became something of a theme. Not the rain precisely, but the weather's cheerful unpredictability, its refusal to conform to the neat categories of "sunny holiday" or "wet afternoon in Cumbria." We would set out in brilliant sunshine, layers shed and optimism high, only to find ourselves forty minutes later scrambling for shelter as clouds gathered with theatrical speed from nowhere. Or we would wake to grey skies and resign ourselves to a day of reading, only to have the sun burst through by ten o'clock, leaving us overdressed and sweaty on a beach walk we had not planned.

I found myself thinking, rather more often than I care to admit, of home. Of the way British weather trains you for disappointment, teaches you to pack for all eventualities, to view a clear forecast with deep suspicion. Here the changes came faster, more dramatically, and somehow with less malice. The rain fell hard but passed quickly. The sun returned without irony.

We did manage our walks, eventually. A morning trek through the pine forest near the beach, the ground springy with needles, the air thick with resin and salt. An afternoon along the coastal path towards the ancient ruins, where we sheltered in a ruined temple during a sudden squall and emerged to find the stone glowing golden in wet light. Each hike became a negotiation with the sky, a constant adjustment of expectations, a lesson in carrying both sunscreen and a waterproof and being genuinely unsure which would prove necessary.

My partner observed, somewhere around day four, that I had become obsessed with checking weather apps, comparing three different forecasts with the fervour of a man placing bets. She was not wrong. There was something addictive about the uncertainty, something that kept each walk fresh even when we covered the same ground twice. The landscape transformed with the light, the sea shifting from turquoise to grey to silver, the olive trees darkening then brightening as clouds passed.

By our final day I had abandoned the apps entirely. We set out in what I can only describe as "Mediterranean mizzle," that peculiar condition where warm rain falls through sunshine and nobody can agree whether an umbrella would be sensible or absurd. We walked slowly, got properly wet, dried almost as quickly, and stopped for lunch at a small place near the beach where the owner seemed neither surprised nor concerned by our appearance.

I think that was the moment I understood something I had been circling all week. The walking mattered, the weather mattered, but what mattered most was letting go of the plan I had made before I arrived, the fixed idea of what a proper holiday ought to look like. The diesel mishap had been embarrassing, the ruined hikes briefly frustrating, but they had also forced a kind of presence I do not always manage at home, where routine carries me along and I forget to notice.

We left our boots on the terrace to dry, packed bags still slightly damp, and drove away without checking the forecast once.