The satnav had other ideas about how to reach Lido di Pomposa. Instead of the straightforward route down the SS309, it sent us through what I can only describe as someone's vegetable patch. My partner Dave was driving, I was navigating, and by navigating I mean holding my phone upside down and pretending I understood Italian road signs. We ended up in a car park that belonged to a beach club, where a man in tiny red shorts and nothing else waved us through with the confidence of someone who definitely did not work there. Turned out he was just very enthusiastic about Fiat Pandas.

By the time we actually found the property, I was ready to abandon the car and walk the rest of the way along the beach. The place itself was one of those neat little bungalows you see in the NovaSoli listings, all terracotta roof and whitewashed walls, with a terrace that looked like it had seen a thousandaperitivi. I fell in love with it immediately, mostly because there was a functioning outdoor shower and I had sand in places I did not know could hold sand.

Our first proper conversation was with the neighbour, a woman called Luisa who appeared over the fence within four minutes of our arrival. She was seventy if she was a day, smoking something that smelled like it had been banned in several EU countries, and wearing a swimsuit that defied several laws of physics. She told us everything about everyone on the strip before we'd even unpacked the car. The couple two doors down were fighting about a tortoise. The man opposite had built his own pizza oven and never stopped talking about it. Someone further along had stolen her sun lounger in 2019 and she had not forgotten, would never forget, had considered legal action. I understood about sixty percent of this because she spoke in a rapid-fire dialect that Dave later described as "Italian but angry."

That evening we walked to the local shops, which took all of seven minutes because Lido di Pomposa is not what you'd call sprawling. We met Marco at the alimentari, a man who insisted on calling me "Signora Inglese" despite my protestations that I had a name and it was not that complicated. He sold us mortadella and asked if we had good football in England. I said no, which he found hilarious, and he gave us an extra handful of olives for honesty. Dave tried to pay with a twenty and Marco looked at him like he'd offered livestock. Cash only, small notes, this is not Milan, Signora Inglese.

The beach itself was where the real characters emerged. There was a man who walked the shoreline every morning at seven, metal detector in hand, wearing a full three-piece suit that he rolled up to his knees. Luisa later informed us he had been searching for the same lost ring since 1987 and had found seventeen other rings, none of them his. There was a group of elderly gentlemen who played cards under a specific umbrella every afternoon, and woe betide any tourist who moved their chairs too close. One of them, Enzo, explained the rules of their game to me for twenty minutes. I understood none of it but nodded vigorously because he had kind eyes and a tattoo of a ship on his forearm that he was very proud of.

The gentle self-reflection came on our third day, sitting on that terrace with a cheap bottle of Sangiovese, watching Luisa shout at someone about parking. I realised I'd spent years chasing holidays that felt like magazines, all polished surfaces and curated experiences, and here I was in a slightly scruffy bungalow complex where everyone knew everyone's business and nobody cared about your Instagram. Dave was trying to assemble a barbecue that had approximately forty-seven parts and no instructions in any language. Enzo had wandered over to help and was mostly hindering. Luisa was offering commentary from her side of the fence, still in that impossible swimsuit, still smoking whatever it was.

I thought about how I'd panicked when the satnav failed, how I'd wanted everything mapped and controlled and predictable. The Emilia-Romagna coast doesn't really do predictable. It does Marco's unsolicited mortadella opinions. It does Enzo's incomprehensible card games. It does Luisa, who is probably still telling someone about that stolen sun lounger right now, and honestly, good for her. Some things deserve to be remembered.

We stayed for ten days. I learned about twelve words of Italian, nine of them accidentally rude. Dave fixed the barbecue on day six, or at least made it functional enough that we didn't poison anyone. The man in the three-piece suit never found his ring, but he did find my sunglasses, which I'd lost on day two and had already replaced. He returned them with a small bow, suited knees still damp from the sea.

I think about that holiday more than I expected to. Not because of the beach, though the beach was lovely in that understated, family-friendly, slightly chaotic way the Adriatic does so well. I think about the people. The way Luisa brought us tomatoes from her garden on our last morning, still warm from the sun, still complaining about the tortoise couple. The way Marco pretended to be surprised to see us every single time, as if English people bought mortadella from him daily. The way Enzo finally admitted, on our final evening, that he didn't really understand the card game rules either, but the others had been playing for forty years and nobody wanted to be the one to ask.

We left the satnav off for the drive home. Got lost twice, found a bakery that sold piadina worth getting lost for, arrived at the airport with flour on our shirts and no regrets. Some holidays you remember for the photographs. This one I remember for Luisa shouting over a fence, for Marco's olives, for a man in a suit searching for something he probably didn't need anymore. For finally understanding that the best directions are the ones you never planned to take.