I have never been so relieved to see a lemon tree in all my life. There it was, just visible over a crumbling stone wall, as our hire car sputtered to a halt on a dusty track somewhere west of Paestum. The sat nav had given up ten minutes earlier, surrendering with a polite but firm "you have reached your destination" while we were clearly surrounded by nothing but buffalo mozzarella farms and the occasional confused goat.

The mishap, if you can call it that, began at Naples airport with what I believed to be a triumphant bit of Italian. "Grazie mille," I told the car hire chap, perhaps with too much theatrical flourish. He looked at me oddly. It was only when we were on the A3, sweating in a Fiat with no air conditioning, that my partner pointed out I had apparently said "grassy mill" with such confidence that the poor man probably thought I was having a stroke. I spent the next hour sulking and mispronouncing every road sign we passed.

The track to our holiday home grew narrower and more theatrical with every bend. A scooter overtook us at one point, the rider carrying what appeared to be three full-sized tomato plants. I took this as a good omen. Campania does not do subtle entrances. The region announces itself with volcanic soil, the smell of wild fennel, and roads that seem designed by someone who fundamentally distrusts straight lines.

When the car finally wheezed to a stop outside a low building with faded terracotta walls, I was prepared for disappointment. What we found instead was a small garden of organised chaos. Lemon trees heavy with fruit, yes, but also a clothesline strung between two posts with what I initially thought was a ghost but turned out to be a sheet the colour of old parchment. A cat regarded us from a windowsill with the expression of a landlord who had seen this all before.

The key was exactly where the owner said it would be: under a terracotta pot beside a thriving rosemary bush that released its scent when I fumbled and knocked the whole thing sideways. The door stuck, then gave way with a groan that suggested it had been holding its breath. Inside, the tiles were cool beneath my feet, that particular Campanian coolness that makes you forget the heat outside. The kitchen smelled faintly of coffee and something else, something green and growing. I opened the shutters and found myself looking at a courtyard where someone, at some point, had given up on formal gardening and simply let things happen. Basil had colonised a cracked pot. A grapevine was attempting to enter through an open window.

I stood there in my airport outfit, still carrying the hire car paperwork and a bottle of water that had gone warm hours ago, and felt something shift. The journey had been ridiculous. My Italian was apparently a war crime. The sat nav had betrayed us. Yet here was this stubborn, lovely place, neither polished nor pretending to be, and it seemed to be waiting with infinite patience for us to catch up.

My partner found the outdoor shower first, a simple arrangement of pipes and courage that looked directly into a hedge of bougainvillea. "We're definitely using that," they announced, already half in love. I was still processing the fact that the bedroom had a ceiling fan that rotated with the enthusiasm of a tired bureaucrat.

By evening we had located the nearest shop, bought bread that was still warm, cheese that needed eating within the hour, and tomatoes that actually tasted of something. We ate at a plastic table in the courtyard, batting away the occasional optimistic mosquito, watching the light change over the lemon trees. The cat had returned, apparently willing to negotiate a friendship.

That first night I slept better than I had in months, lulled by the fan's lazy rotation and the distant sound of someone, somewhere, singing badly in Italian. The mishaps of arrival had become the story we would tell. The holiday, it turned out, had started the moment everything went slightly wrong.