I have never been so happy to see a lemon tree in my entire life. After six hours of driving from Naples airport, during which our youngest was sick on my partner's sandals and I accidentally joined an autostrada toll booth queue reserved for lorries, the sight of our little place in San Marco di Castellabate felt like arriving at the gates of paradise. Albeit a paradise that smelled faintly of citrus and child vomit.

The sat-nav had given up on us somewhere near Salerno, so we had been navigating by instinct and a crumpled printout from 2019. We crawled down lanes barely wide enough for a Vespa, convinced we were heading for certain doom, until suddenly there it was: a modest stone building with terracotta pots and that particular faded charm that only Italian coastal properties seem to possess. I may have wept slightly. The children thought I was laughing.

Our host, a splendid woman called Rosa who spoke rapid Campanian dialect with occasional gestures that needed no translation, handed us keys and a bottle of her own limoncello. I attempted my finest GCSE Italian, confidently informing her that I was "very pregnant" instead of "very grateful." She patted my arm in what I choose to believe was sympathy rather than concern for my mental state.

The first hour was pure chaos of the most wonderful kind. Our eldest discovered the outdoor shower and immediately treated it as a personal water park. Our youngest, recovered from his motorway ordeal, commandeered the terrace and declared it his kingdom. I stood in the kitchen, which was compact enough that you could wash dishes, reach the fridge, and accidentally turn on the hob simultaneously, and felt something unfamiliar settle over me. It might have been peace. It might have been exhaustion. Probably both.

What struck me immediately was how the place managed to be simple without being basic. The furniture had that comfortable worn-in quality, nothing too precious for sandy feet or spilt granita. The bedrooms were cool and dark, perfect for afternoon escapes when the Campanian sun became properly serious. But it was the outside space that genuinely won us over. A covered terrace with a long wooden table where we would spend most of our waking hours, a barbecue that looked like it had witnessed decades of family arguments about cooking times, and those lemon trees everywhere, heavy with fruit and bees.

I had grand plans for our first evening. We would stroll to the village, find a trattoria, behave like civilised Europeans. Instead, we opened Rosa's limoncello, ordered takeaway pizza from a place she recommended, and sat on that terrace watching the light change over the hills until the children fell asleep with their heads on the table. My partner and I stayed up, slightly drunk, discussing whether we could actually live here forever and concluding that we absolutely could, provided we never needed to parallel park again.

That first night, I woke at three in the morning to absolute silence broken only by distant waves and what I later learned was a neighbourhood cat with strong opinions. I lay there thinking about how we had arrived as a frazzled unit of chaos and somehow, already, the edges were softening. The mishaps weren't disasters anymore. They were just the story of how we got here.