I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Dimaro in the Val di Sole did not disappoint. We had flown into Verona, picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of cheese, and set off towards the Dolomites with the sort of confidence that only comes from having watched one YouTube video about Italian motorways. Three hours later, we were winding through mountain passes, my partner navigating with her phone held at an angle that suggested she was reading a particularly gripping novel rather than following directions. Then came the mishap. I had insisted on packing light, which in my world means one rucksack and an enormous carrier bag from Waitrose containing walking boots, a half-eaten sandwich, and a bottle of suncream. Somewhere near Trento, at a petrol station where I was attempting to order two coffees with the grace of a semaphore enthusiast, I set the bag down. We drove away without it. It was forty minutes before I noticed, and by then the bag was either in the hands of a very confused Italian truck driver or had begun its own holiday entirely.

We arrived at our holiday home in Dimaro in a state of mild hysteria, me mourning my boots and my partner trying not to laugh at the sight of me in canvas plimsolls meant for a garden party. The property sat on the edge of the village, a solid wooden chalet-style place with a balcony that looked directly up at the Brenta Dolomites. I had expected grandeur, but the reality was something quieter and better. The mountains did not shout. They simply waited, massive and patient, while the afternoon light moved across their faces like someone slowly turning a page.

The owners had left a bottle of local wine and a note about walking routes, which I read with the desperate attention of a man who had lost his proper footwear. The Val di Sole in summer is made for walkers, and Dimaro sits at that perfect point where you can step out of the door and find yourself on a proper mountain trail within ten minutes. We decided to attempt something gentle the next morning, a riverside path that followed the Noce upstream towards the village of Carciato. I wore my plimsolls. My feet hated me by the second kilometre, but the valley was so absurdly beautiful that I hardly cared. The river ran green and urgent, fed by snowmelt from peaks we could not yet see, and the path kept ducking into woods where the air smelled of pine resin and something sweeter I could not name.

The weather, of course, had its own ideas. We had checked the forecast, which promised sun, and had dressed accordingly. By midday, clouds had gathered over the western ridges with the speed of a pub argument, and we found ourselves caught in a downpour that turned the path to something resembling porridge. We sheltered under a wooden bridge, watching the river swell and the rain come across the valley in grey curtains. My partner, who is wiser than me in most things, had packed waterproofs in her sensible rucksack. I stood there in a thin cotton shirt, pretending to enjoy the experience while water found its way into places water should not go.

That evening, back at the chalet, we dried everything we owned and ate pasta on the balcony while the mountains cleared themselves of weather. The sunset came late and lasted forever, turning the Brenta peaks pink and then gold and then a colour I can only describe as smug. I thought about my lost boots, my soaked plimsolls, my general unreadiness for the world. There is something humbling about mountains, something that strips away the illusion that you are in charge of anything much. The Val di Sole does not care about your plans or your packing or your carefully researched weather apps. It simply offers itself, take it or leave it, and the leaving it would be the greater loss.

We spent the rest of the week walking every trail we could reach from the door, adjusting our ambitions to the weather's moods, learning which paths dried quickly after rain and which turned to bogs that would swallow a lesser man whole. I bought replacement boots in a shop in Male, where an elderly man measured my feet with the solemnity of a priest and sold me something that looked like it had been designed for Alpine troops in 1953. They were perfect. We walked to the Cascate di Vallesinella one morning, a waterfall that roars out of the forest with the enthusiasm of a relative who has had too much wine at Christmas, and spent another afternoon on a gentle loop through meadows above Dimaro where the only sounds were cowbells and our own breathing.

The heat came in waves, some days sticky and close in the valley bottom, others sharp and clear with a breeze that carried the cold of high places. We learned to start early, to carry more water than we thought necessary, to trust that the afternoon storms would pass if we gave them patience and a decent hat. On our last evening, we walked up to a viewpoint above the village as the light failed, watching the first stars appear over peaks that had begun to feel like old friends. My plimsolls, dried and brushed and still faintly stained with Dolomite mud, sat on the balcony where I had left them. I had not worn them since the first day. Some things, I had discovered, are worth losing to find something better.