I have never been brilliant with directions, and my phone's decision to die exactly halfway between Salerno and our holiday cottage did nothing to improve my record. There we were, three children in the back asking if we were nearly there yet, my wife quietly Googling on her rapidly overheating mobile, and me pretending I recognised a single olive grove from the blurry screenshot I had taken at the airport. We missed the turn for Stella Cilento twice. The first time because a goat wandered into the road and I panicked. The second time because I was still laughing about the goat.

The Cilento coast is not the sort of place that hurries you along, which is fortunate because we arrived nearly two hours later than planned, rumpled and smelling of petrol station sandwiches. The cottage sits in the hills above the Gulf of Policastro, surrounded by terraced gardens and the kind of silence that makes you realise how loud your own family is. I had promised everyone a quick swim before dinner. Instead we stood in the driveway, me fumbling with a key safe that apparently required the patience of a saint and the finger dexterity of a concert pianist.

When the door finally opened, the smell hit us before the view did. Lemon trees, warm stone, something herby that my wife later identified as wild oregano growing in the garden wall. The children bolted past me to claim bedrooms, which left me in the kitchen with a welcome bottle of local Aglianico and the slow realisation that I had packed approximately fourteen phone chargers and not a single corkscrew. This is my special gift. I can organise an entire family holiday across three countries but forget the one tool required to open the wine I specifically bought for arrival day.

The cottage itself is the sort of place that improves the longer you look at it. Terracotta floors that stay cool even in August. Wooden shutters that actually close properly, unlike ours at home. A covered terrace where we would spend most evenings, watching the light change over the hills while the children finally ran out of energy and fell asleep in their chairs. But that first evening, everything was chaos. Suitcases exploded in corridors. Someone had already lost a flip flop. I discovered the washing machine by walking into it in the dark.

I found the corkscrew eventually, naturally in the first drawer I had checked but somehow missed, and we sat on that terrace as the sun went down and the cicadas started up. My wife and I did not say much. The children were finally quiet, eating bread and local mozzarella that tasted nothing like the stuff from our supermarket. I remember thinking that this was why we bothered with the hassle, the packing, the missed turns, the goat. Not for perfection. For this particular kind of tired peace, in a place that felt immediately like somewhere we could slow down.

The next morning I woke to my youngest standing beside the bed asking if Italy had squirrels. I said I did not know. She said she had already seen a lizard and was upgrading her expectations. We spent that first full day doing almost nothing, which was exactly right. A walk down to the village for coffee and pastries. A swim in the pool while I read the same paragraph of my book four times and kept dozing off. Dinner cooked slowly, badly, with me insisting on using the outdoor barbecue despite having no idea how to control its temperature.

By the third evening I had stopped checking my emails. By the fifth I had genuinely forgotten what day of the week it was. The children made friends with a neighbouring cat and named it despite my warnings. We ate figs from the garden tree and accepted that we would never eat a supermarket fig again. I only got lost once more, taking a wrong turn on a coastal walk and adding an hour to what should have been a gentle stroll, though the children declared it an adventure and still mention it as a highlight.

We left with sand in the car, wine stains on my favourite shirt, and a promise to return that I actually mean. The key safe and I had reached an understanding by the end. The goat, I assume, is still wandering wherever it pleases.