I have never been so grateful to see a man with a moped and a crate of oranges as I was on the afternoon I arrived in Praia a Mare. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The journey down from Lamezia Terme airport had been going almost suspiciously well. Hire car sorted in twenty minutes, motorway clear, even the radio playing something that sounded like Phil Collins in Italian. I had allowed myself a small moment of smugness. I knew exactly where I was going. I had the address, I had the sat nav, I had printed directions because I am the sort of person who does not trust technology and also does not trust myself with technology.

The property was one of those white-washed holiday lets you see on the NovaSol website, perched up with a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the sort of place where you imagine yourself drinking Negronis and finally reading that book about the Renaissance you have been carrying around since 2019. I turned off the main road, followed a narrow lane, then another narrower lane, then something that was technically a path but which my Fiat Panda treated as a personal challenge.

That was when the sat nav gave up. Not politely, not with a recalculating tone, but with a sort of digital shrug. The screen went blank, then displayed a map of somewhere in Portugal. I do not know why Portugal. I have never been to Portugal. I sat there, surrounded by dry stone walls and what I later learned were bergamot trees, with absolutely no idea which direction the sea was in. I could smell it, which was deeply unhelpful. Smell does not come with a compass.

I got out of the car. A dog barked somewhere. Another dog answered. It felt like the opening of a film where the protagonist makes terrible decisions. I was considering my options, which were essentially walk or cry, when the moped appeared.

The man riding it was perhaps sixty, deeply tanned, wearing a vest that had once been white and trousers that had never been anything in particular. He slowed down, looked at me, looked at my car, looked at the expression on my face which I can only describe as British distress. He did not speak English. I do not speak Italian beyond ordering coffee and apologising. This did not stop him.

He pointed at my phone. I showed him the address. He squinted, then laughed. Not unkindly. The sort of laugh that said, you have done something impressively stupid but I have time. He gestured for me to follow him. I did, crawling behind his moped up a track that my suspension will never forgive me for, until we emerged above a small cluster of houses and there, unmistakably, was the white building I had been staring at online for three months.

He helped me with my case. I tried to give him money. He waved it away, then took an orange from his crate and pressed it into my hand. It was warm from the engine. I have never tasted anything so sharp and sweet. He said something I did not understand, grinned, and puttered off down the hill.

I stood there with my orange and my suitcase and my mild sunburn from the car window, and I thought about how I had spent the entire journey controlling every variable, checking every detail, trusting nothing and no one. And the thing that had actually got me here was a stranger on a moped who found my incompetence genuinely amusing.

The key was in the lockbox, exactly as promised. The view was ridiculous, all blue water and distant mountains. I sat on the terrace with my orange, juice running down my wrist, and watched the light change. Somewhere below, a woman was calling out to someone named Marco. A scooter passed, music playing. The dogs had stopped their conversation.

I stayed for ten days. I never learned that man's name. But I saw him twice more, always on his moped, always with his oranges, and each time he waved as if we were old friends. Because in his eyes, I think we were. That is how it works in places like this. You arrive as a stranger, you make one small disaster of yourself, and someone helps you because they have absolutely nothing better to do and because it gives them a story to tell later.

I ate fish grilled simply with lemon, bought from a man who explained the catch with elaborate hand gestures even though I understood none of the words. I drank wine that cost four euros and tasted like sunlight. I walked down to the beach in the early mornings when the old men were setting up their umbrellas and arguing about football with the dedication of theologians debating scripture.

But mostly I remember that first afternoon, the warmth of the orange in my palm, the smell of the sea finally making sense, and the particular humiliation of realising that the best moments of a holiday are the ones you do not plan.