I should have known the holiday proper started the moment our sat-nav gave up entirely somewhere between Salerno and nowhere. We'd been winding up through Campania's hills for the best part of an hour, the sort of roads where you meet a tractor coming the other way and both drivers shrug with theatrical resignation. My partner was navigating, which chiefly involved saying "I think it's this way" with decreasing confidence until we found ourselves in what I can only describe as someone's courtyard. Three dogs barked. An elderly gentleman in a vest watered his tomatoes and didn't even look up. This, I thought, is either completely wrong or absolutely right.

Turned out it was neither. We were merely lost, though lost in that particular Italian fashion where the scenery is so absurdly lovely you half-suspect you've died and woken in a tourism brochure. We bumped back down the lane, took a fork that looked less like a driveway, and finally spotted the stone walls and terracotta roof of our Perdifumo. The place sat perched on its hillside like it had grown there organically, which in fairness it probably had, given the ancient olive trees pressing against the terrace.

The key was where they'd said it would be, under a terracotta pot beside a lavender bush that had clearly gone feral years ago. I bent to retrieve it and stood on a snail. Not a small snail either. The crunch was devastating. I looked about, half-expecting a nonna to materialise from the cypress trees and judge me harshly. My partner found this hilarious. I carried the guilt into the house like excess baggage.

Inside, the place smelled of stone and dried herbs and that particular coolness you only get in thick-walled buildings that have seen off centuries of August heat. The kitchen had a proper fireplace, absurdly large, and I immediately pictured myself as some sort of rustic genius, preparing elaborate meals from local markets. The reality, I suspected, would involve simpler achievements. Making coffee without flooding the counter, perhaps.

We dumped our bags and did what we always do when arriving somewhere new: wandered without purpose, which is how the best discoveries happen. The garden terraces dropped away in levels, each one claiming its own personality. The middle terrace had a lemon tree heavy with fruit, and I spent several minutes just standing there, inhaling. I don't normally stand and inhale at fruit. Travel does strange things.

That evening we walked down to Perdifumo village, which took longer than expected because we kept stopping to look at things. A wall covered in some flowering vine I couldn't identify. A cat asleep on a windowsill in a position that suggested advanced yoga training. The village itself was barely there, really, a cluster of houses around a church, a bar with three tables outside. We sat with beers and watched nothing much happen, which was precisely the point.

I found myself thinking about the snail. Ridiculous, but there it was. I'd come to Campania dreaming of slow living, of that deliberate pace the Italians seem to manage without effort, and I'd literally crushed a creature that embodied the whole philosophy. There's a metaphor there, though I'm not entirely sure what it is. Perhaps just that I'm a clumsy ambassador for my own intentions.

The bar owner brought us crisps without asking. The church bell rang seven times, though it was nearer eight. A scooter passed, its rider carrying what appeared to be a full-length mirror. We didn't question this. We were, by then, happily lost in the right place, which is the only kind of lost worth being.