I have never been so happy to see a pine tree in all my life. After six hours of driving from Bologna airport, a wrong turn that took us through what I can only describe as a very committed onion festival, and one spectacular argument about whether the sat nav was possessed or merely sarcastic, we finally spotted the tall, skinny pines that mean you have reached the Lidi of Ferrara. Lido di Spina, to be exact. Our home for the week.

The mishap, because there always is one, happened at a toll booth somewhere near Ravenna. I had practised my Italian. I had the phrase "due biglietti" ready to go. What came out, thanks to a rogue brain freeze and the pressure of a queue forming behind us, was "due biscotti." The attendant looked at me with the kind of patience usually reserved for very small children and very old dogs. My partner, Mark, laughed so hard he nearly choked on his own embarrassment. We got the ticket. I got a story that will apparently never stop being funny.

The property itself was one of those neat little terraced numbers you see all along this stretch, tucked behind the main road and a short stroll from the beach. Nothing flashy, nothing pretending to be anything other than what it was: a clean, sensible base for people who plan to spend most of their time either in the sea or eating. We fell into the second category rather heavily.

The kitchen, I noted with the seriousness of a man who had packed three cookbooks for a seven-night stay, was compact but workable. Two rings, a fridge with a freezer compartment that could hold approximately four ice cubes or one very optimistic pizza, and a collection of pans that had seen things. I loved it immediately. Mark looked at me with the weary affection of someone who knows they will be washing up while I "just check something" for the fifth time.

Our first evening, we did what everyone does. We walked to the nearest supermarket, which turned out to be one of those brilliantly Italian affairs where the fresh pasta section commands more respect than the wine aisle, and where a man behind the counter will genuinely argue with you about the optimal ageing of Pecorino. I bought far too much. Fresh tagliatelle, a ball of mozzarella that was still warm, tomatoes that smelled like tomatoes rather than faintly of regret, and some local olive oil in a bottle that looked like it contained a potion. Mark bought beer and a bag of crisps. We were both very happy with our choices.

I attempted a simple pomodoro. How hard could it be? The tomatoes were perfect, the garlic was local, the basil came from a pot on the property's tiny terrace that I had already started talking to. I burned the garlic. Not a little. Properly, determinedly, created-a-smoke-alarm-situation burned it. The neighbours, an Italian family who had been having a perfectly peaceful aperitivo, were treated to me flapping a tea towel and swearing in a language I do not speak. Mark opened a window. The garlic went in the bin. I started again, with more humility and a lower heat.

The second attempt was, if I say so myself, not bad. The pasta cooked in a pan that was slightly too small, because I am an optimist and a poor judge of volume. We ate on the terrace with the pine trees doing that whispery thing they do in the evening breeze, and I felt something shift. The drive, the toll booth, the smoke alarm. None of it mattered. We had warm mozzarella, slightly overfilled pasta bowls, and a week ahead of us.

The next morning I was up early, which never happens, driven by what I can only describe as food anxiety. The local market in Lido di Spina sets up near the main piazza, and I had read, in my pre-holiday research that Mark found "concerning," that the fish van arrived before seven. I arrived at half past, which was late enough to find the good stuff mostly gone but early enough to secure two fine-looking sardines and a squid that I had absolutely no idea how to clean. The fishmonger, a woman with hands that had clearly spent decades doing things I was afraid to attempt, showed me. I nodded as if I understood. I did not understand. I YouTubed it in the supermarket car park, leaning against a Fiat Panda and trying not to look like a man watching squid disembowelment videos in public.

That evening's attempt at cooking seafood was, by any objective measure, a qualified disaster. The squid went rubbery. The sardines were fine but I had bought two, which is not a meal so much as a gesture. Mark, who is a better person than me, said they were delicious and made a large salad to fill the gaps. I sulked briefly, then ate the salad, then admitted that perhaps I needed to stop treating a holiday kitchen like a test I was determined to fail.

We found our rhythm eventually. Breakfast became a ritual of cornetti from the bakery two streets over, eaten standing at the kitchen counter because the terrace was already too hot by nine, washed down with coffee from a moka pot that I had to buy because the property did not have one and I consider this a serious oversight in any Italian accommodation. The woman in the hardware shop where I purchased it asked if I knew how to use it. I said yes. I did not know how to use it. The first attempt produced something that looked like tar and tasted like regret. By day three I had it sorted. Progress.

Lunches were simple, market-driven affairs. We ate a lot of piadina, that flatbread miracle that the Emilia Romagna coast does so well, filled with squacquerone cheese and rocket, or with prosciutto and figs when the fruit man had good ones. The figs were a revelation, sticky and honeyed, nothing like the sad specimens that appear in British supermarkets for approximately three days each August. I ate too many and do not regret a single one.

Dinners became our project. I learned to work with what the kitchen could actually do, rather than what I wished it could. One ring for sauce, one for pasta, timing everything with the precision of a man who has no other choice. I made a respectable cacio e pepe using Pecorino from the market and pepper that I had brought from home because I am that person now. Mark made a salad that actually involved thought rather than just opening a bag. We ate well. We ate simply. We ate with the satisfaction of people who had earned their hunger through beach laziness and market wandering.

There was a rotisserie chicken place near the main road that we visited on the night I declared I was not cooking, a declaration that Mark greeted with the relief of a man who has been waiting for it. The chicken was excellent, seasoned with something involving rosemary and lemon, served with roast potatoes that had been sitting under the heat lamps perhaps thirty minutes too long but which we ate anyway because we were on holiday and standards are different on holiday. We took it back to the terrace and ate with our fingers like teenagers, watching the sky do that particular coastal thing where it stays light for ages and then suddenly does not.

I think what I loved most, looking back, was the particular intimacy of cooking in someone else's space with ingredients I did not fully understand. The failures were as memorable as the successes, perhaps more so. The burned garlic, the rubbery squid, the moka pot disaster. Each one taught me something, usually about my own impatience, occasionally about actual cooking. The market became familiar. The fishmonger stopped showing me how to clean things and simply did it, trusting me to figure out the rest. The baker recognised me enough to ask if I wanted "the usual," which felt like a citizenship test I had somehow passed.

On our last morning I made coffee that actually worked, ate a final cornetto, and packed the moka pot in my suitcase because I could not bear to leave it. Mark rolled his eyes and made room. We drove away past the pine trees, past the toll booth where I had asked for biscuits, past the onion festival that I still do not fully understand. I was already planning what I would cook when we got home, which is perhaps the truest measure of a holiday's success. Not the photographs, not the tan, but the desire to keep going, to keep trying, to burn the garlic and start again.