I have never been brilliant with directions, and my first trip to Pizzo Calabro proved it in spectacular fashion. We had flown into Lamezia Terme, collected our hire car, and set off full of optimism and slightly stale airport sandwiches. The sat nav seemed confident. I was not. Somewhere between a olive grove and what I can only describe as a very committed goat, I took a wrong turn that led us up a track so narrow I had to fold the wing mirrors in. My wife sat in silence, which is never good. The children found it hilarious, of course, until they realised this meant a delayed arrival and therefore a delayed swim.

Forty minutes, one panicked three-point turn, and a brief but meaningful conversation with a local farmer later, we found the proper road. The villa sat perched above the coastline, all terracotta roof and whitewashed walls, looking terribly patient with our nonsense. I stepped out of the car, stretched my legs, and promptly walked into a low-hanging lemon tree branch. First impressions, then: Calabria was beautiful, I was a clot, and the smell of citrus was absolutely everywhere.

The villa itself was exactly the sort of place that undoes you after a long journey. Nothing fancy, nothing trying too hard. A simple kitchen with tiles that had probably seen forty years of family cooking. A terrace where you could stand with a drink and watch the sea turn from afternoon blue to evening gold. The pool was small and perfect, already catching the last of the sun. My youngest dropped his suitcase in the doorway and made a run for it, shoes still on, hollering something about bombing. We let him. Some rules can wait.

What struck me first was the quiet. Not silence exactly, because there were birds and distant church bells and the occasional scooter puttering past somewhere below. But the kind of quiet that makes you aware of your own breathing. We had come from a flat in London where the bin lorries start at six and the neighbour's dog has opinions at midnight. Here, the afternoon stretched out like something you could actually touch.

I made the mistake of attempting a proper Italian coffee in the little moka pot I found in the cupboard. I have never mastered these things. It sputtered, it hissed, it produced something that tasted of ambition and regret. My wife, who actually reads instructions, took over and produced something proper. I drank mine anyway, out of stubbornness, sitting on that terrace with my feet up, watching a gecko dart across the wall. There is a particular shame in being shown up by a lizard, but I was too tired to care.

By evening, the mishaps of the journey had already softened into something we would laugh about properly later. The goat, the branch, my coffee. We walked down to the nearest shop for bread and cheese and tomatoes that actually tasted of something. The children fell asleep at the table, sun-drunk and chlorine-happy. I carried them to bed, one under each arm, feeling like a man who had finally arrived somewhere that mattered, even if he had taken the scenic route to get there.