The drive down from Naples was supposed to take two hours, but thanks to my steadfast refusal to trust Google Maps and an unfortunate incident involving a goat, three pensioners, and a very narrow bridge outside Vallo della Lucania, we rolled up to Laureana Cilento well after dark. I had been adamant about taking the scenic route. My partner, who had been navigating using a crumpled printout from 2009, was less amused. The goat, I should clarify, was entirely unbothered by the whole affair.

We found the place eventually, a proper stone farmhouse sitting among olive groves with a pool glimmering under the security light like an invitation we were too exhausted to accept. The key was exactly where the owner said it would be, in a terracotta pot that I knocked over twice before successfully retrieving it. The second time, I swore I heard my partner mutter something about the goat being better company.

But then we opened the door, and the smell hit us. Not the musty, closed-up smell of a holiday let, but something warm and faintly herby, like someone had been roasting garlic and rosemary in preparation for our arrival. It turned out to be the previous week's guests, who had apparently cooked a farewell feast and left the remnants of their olive oil and herb-encrusted optimism hanging in the air. I immediately decided we would do the same, though with considerably more chaos.

The kitchen at Laureana Cilento is the sort that makes you want to cook even if you cannot, in any meaningful sense, cook. Terracotta tiles, wooden beams, a fireplace you could practically stand in, and a gas hob that required the confidence of a seasoned pilot to ignite. We unpacked our provisions from the Cilento Coop, a supermarket trip that had taken forty-five minutes because I kept getting distracted by cheeses I could not name and aubergines the size of my head. I had also purchased what I believed to be local wine but later discovered was cooking wine, a fact that became apparent only after I had poured two generous glasses and wondered why we were both pulling faces like we'd sucked lemons.

The next morning, properly fortified with actual coffee from the moka pot I nearly destroyed through over-tightening, we ventured to the market in Vallo della Lucania. This is where I come slightly unstuck as a person, because I cannot resist a market. My partner had to physically remove me from a stall selling nothing but different grades of local olive oil, where I was engaged in an increasingly passionate conversation with a man who spoke no English and was, I now realise, probably trying to close up for lunch. I emerged with three litres of oil, a bag of dried figs, and a ceramic jug I definitely did not need. My partner emerged with the patience of a saint and a wheel of caciocavallo cheese that we ate in chunks for the next three days, straight from the paper, like absolute animals.

That evening, armed with market vegetables and misplaced confidence, I attempted my first proper meal. The recipe was simple enough: pasta with courgettes, mint, and pecorino. The execution was complicated by my discovery that Italian courgettes are firmer than their British counterparts, requiring more cooking than anticipated, and by my partner's well-meaning suggestion that we open the second bottle of wine to let it breathe. It breathed. We breathed it. The courgettes remained somewhat al dente, which is a generous way of describing vegetables that still had structural integrity. We ate it anyway, sitting on the terrace with the crickets going full pelt and the last light fading over the hills, and I have rarely been more content with a meal that was, objectively, a bit chewy.

The local pubs, if you can call them that, became our evening ritual. There is a place in the nearby village, I will not name it because I cannot spell it and because I suspect the owner prefers the mystery, where they serve wine from unmarked bottles and snacks that appear without ordering. One night we got crisps. Another night, a plate of white anchovies that I ate with my fingers while my partner looked on in what I choose to interpret as admiration. The third night, the owner's wife emerged from the kitchen with a tupperware of her own preserved olives and simply placed it between us, as if we were a problem she had decided to solve with brine and patience.

By our fourth day, I had developed what I can only describe as kitchen hubris. I purchased octopus from a fish van that appeared in the village square at seven in the morning, a transaction conducted entirely through pointing and hopeful smiling. The octopus, I learned too late, requires either expertise or witchcraft to prepare properly. I possessed neither. After two hours of simmering that produced something with the texture of a rubber bath mat, we admitted defeat and walked to the nearest proper restaurant, where a man who had clearly never ruined a cephalopod in his life served us the most perfect grilled fish I have ever tasted. I ate it with the humility of the defeated and the appetite of someone who had been boiling octopus since breakfast.

Our final morning, I made one last market trip alone, leaving my partner to pack. I returned with more oil, more figs, and a jar of local honey that I had sampled from a wooden stick offered by a woman who told me, in elaborate Italian I mostly misunderstood, about her father's bees. I understood enough to know it mattered to her, and that I wanted to take some of that care home with me. We left the farmhouse cleaner than we found it, though the kitchen still smelled faintly of my various experiments, and the terracotta pot by the door sat slightly crooked from my earlier fumbling.

Driving away, back toward that goat bridge and the long road north, my partner observed that we had eaten exceptionally well for people who had technically cooked badly for most of the week. I think that is the point of places like Laureana Cilento, though. The kitchen invites you in, the markets overwhelm you with possibility, and the local pubs forgive your mistakes with wine and wordless hospitality. You arrive thinking you will master Italian cooking in a week, and you leave having mastered something more useful: the ability to enjoy yourself thoroughly while getting it slightly wrong.