Getting to Sapri was supposed to be the easy bit. I'd done the hard part, hadn't I? Booked the cottage, packed sensible shoes, even remembered my European plug adapter. But nobody warned me about the Sat Nav's vendetta against Campanian roads. One moment I was cruising along the SS18 feeling rather pleased with myself, the next I was wedged between a stone wall and a furious man on a Vespa, both of us staring at a sign that definitely said something about goats.

I eventually found the property down a lane that my rental car considered a personal insult. The cottage sat there like it had been waiting for me to arrive flustered and twenty minutes late, which of course I was. Maria, the keyholder, appeared from nowhere with a smile that suggested she'd seen this exact scene roughly four thousand times before.

"English?" she said, not unkindly. I admitted it. She nodded with the resigned patience of a woman who had watched many English people reverse badly into her village.

The cottage itself was simple and spotless, but I barely got through the door before Maria's husband Enzo materialised with two plastic chairs and a bottle of something homemade. "Sit," he commanded, though not ungently. I sat. The something homemade turned out to be limoncello at approximately eleven in the morning. Enzo explained, through elaborate hand gestures and the occasional Italian word I pretended to understand, that this was medicinal. For the stress of driving. The stress of my driving, specifically, which the entire village had apparently witnessed through some mysterious network of curtain-twitchers and Vespas.

By afternoon I had met half the street. There was Gino from two doors down, who appeared with tomatoes from his garden and proceeded to deliver a twenty-minute lecture on soil acidity that I nodded through despite understanding perhaps three words. There was elderly Rosa, who pressed cold lemonade on me and insisted on showing photographs of her grandchildren in Milan until her cat escaped and the chase became a neighbourhood event involving three pensioners and a broom.

The butcher, Antonio, spotted me lingering uncertainly outside his shop and physically pulled me inside. "You are the English," he announced to no one in particular. His wife emerged from the back, wiping her hands. They debated loudly about what I should eat for dinner while I stood there like a child waiting for parents to finish arguing. Antonio won. I left with enough sausage to feed a rugby team and precise instructions, delivered through pointing and raised eyebrows, about preparation.

That evening I sat on my tiny terrace with Enzo's limoncello and Antonio's sausage, watching the village perform its evening rituals. Gino watered his tomatoes with theatrical precision. Rosa shouted at her cat. Maria and Enzo passed on their evening stroll, waving without breaking stride, as if we'd known each other for years rather than hours.

I had arrived that morning convinced I was embarking on a solitary escape, some meaningful communion with landscape and self. Instead I had been collected, fed, and thoroughly talked at by people who seemed to view my incompetence as charming rather than annoying. The hills above Sapri were beautiful, certainly, and the sea glinted in the distance. But it was the sheer, uninvited humanity of the place that disarmed me completely.

I came for quiet and found noise. I came for independence and found myself adopted. Sometimes the best holidays are the ones where your plans go slightly, comically wrong, and the locals decide to rescue you whether you asked for it or not.