I have never been more grateful for a sat nav than I was driving into Cattolica last July. My partner had insisted we could manage without one, relying instead on his "excellent sense of direction" and a printed map from 2009. Three hours after leaving Bologna airport, we found ourselves down a farm track somewhere near Ravenna, surrounded by sunflowers and the growing suspicion that we were not, in fact, fifteen minutes from the Adriatic coast. The sat nav was purchased at the next petrol station for forty euros, which I have since framed as the best money we have ever spent.

We arrived at our holiday home in the early evening, rattled and ravenous. The property sat on a quiet residential street, a modest terraced house with a small garden and one of those outdoor showers that Italians seem to treat as essential as indoor plumbing. I immediately understood why. After lugging our cases up the stairs, I stood on the tiny balcony and caught my first proper smell of the place: charcoal smoke from someone's barbecue, salt from the sea somewhere beyond the rooftops, and something else I could not place but wanted very much to eat.

The kitchen was compact but decently equipped, and we had made a solemn vow to cook properly rather than fall into the easy rhythm of restaurants every night. This lasted precisely until we discovered we had no olive oil, no salt, and that I had somehow packed three bottles of sun cream but no pasta. We walked to the nearest supermarket, a Conad about ten minutes away, and I experienced that particular humiliation of the British tourist abroad: standing in an aisle of unfamiliar flour types, realising I did not know the Italian word for "plain," and eventually buying something called "00" on the basis that it sounded authoritative.

The next morning I attempted piadina for breakfast, that flatbread Emilia Romagna does so well. I had watched a video the week before and felt confident. The result was chewier than intended, with raw patches and burnt edges coexisting in ways that defied physics. My partner ate two out of politeness, then suggested perhaps we visit the weekly market in the town centre. I agreed with the enthusiasm of someone being offered a lifeline.

The market was glorious chaos. Stalls spilled from Piazza I Maggio down towards the port, everything laid out with an artistry that made our Tesco Metro feel like a crime against aesthetics. Tomatoes still warm from the vine, wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano cut to order, bunches of basil that filled your hands with scent. I bought far too much, as one does, including a hunk of squacquerone cheese that oozed dramatically in the heat and had to be eaten with a spoon in our kitchen before it escaped its paper entirely.

That evening I made a proper effort. Tagliatelle with ragu, using proper sfoglia from a stall that made it fresh while I watched. The woman running it spoke no English and I speak restaurant Italian at best, but we managed through pointing and appreciative noises. I cooked slowly, drinking a cheap Sangiovese from plastic cups on the balcony, and the result was actually decent. Not Nonna decent, but recognisably food. We ate outside as the light faded, listening to someone else's radio playing something operatic, and I felt that particular holiday contentment that has nothing to do with perfection and everything to do with being somewhere else, trying your best, and failing upwards.

The fish market down at the port became our morning ritual. Nothing sophisticated: just watching the boats come in, the crates of sardines and anchovies being hauled about, the old men arguing about prices with the comfortable hostility of people who have known each other for decades. I bought squid one morning, determined to cook it properly, and produced something that my partner described charitably as "educational." We ate it with bread and excessive lemon, laughing at my ambition, and finished with gelato from a place near the main square that did a pistachio so good it made me angry at every pistachio ice cream I had eaten before.

By our final day I had settled into a comfortable rhythm. Breakfast was simple: good bread, squacquerone if I could find it, tomatoes with salt and oil. Lunches were picnics on the beach, assembled from market bits. Dinners became my project, sometimes successful, always attempted with proper intent. I never mastered piadina, not really. But I made a respectable brodo, and a passable tortellini in brodo using proper broth and terrible tortellini from the supermarket because I had lost my nerve about making my own.

On our last evening I stood in that small kitchen, chopping onions with the confidence of someone who had at least learned where the good knife was kept, and I thought about how holidays change you in small ways. I would return home with a new appreciation for proper ingredients, a slightly expanded waistline, and the certain knowledge that I would never again attempt to cook squid without proper instruction. The sat nav came too, obviously. Some things you do not leave behind.