I have never been brilliant with directions, so it will surprise no one that I managed to get us lost somewhere between Bologna and the coast. My partner was navigating, which in our relationship means I was driving and he was holding his phone at an angle that made the map entirely unreadable. We ended up down a farm track surrounded by flat green fields, with a very unimpressed herd of cattle watching us perform a twelve-point turn. By the time we found the actual road to Lido degli Estensi, I had sweated through my t-shirt and developed a deep personal grudge against satellite technology.

The flat itself was on the third floor of a low-rise block, the sort of building that looks unremarkable from the outside but opens up into somewhere you genuinely want to spend time. I flung open the balcony doors before we had even unpacked, desperate for air, and was met with that particular heavy warmth of the Adriatic in late June. The sort of heat that wraps around you like a damp towel and makes every movement feel like a conscious decision. I stood there in my still-damp shirt and felt immediately, gloriously, on holiday.

We had planned to walk. That was the whole point of this trip, really. A week of coastal paths and early mornings and feeling smug about our step counts. I had packed proper walking boots, moisture-wicking socks, the full kit. The first morning we set off before eight, heading north along the shore towards Porto Garibaldi, and for about forty minutes it was absolutely idyllic. The beach was empty, the sand still cool, and the light had that soft golden quality that makes even someone as unphotogenic as me consider stopping for a selfie.

Then the weather turned. Not dramatically, not with thunder or anything cinematic. Just a gradual thickening of the air, a greyness creeping in from the sea, and suddenly we were walking through what felt like warm soup. My boots, those expensive supposedly breathable ones, became personal saunas. We made it to the harbour, admired the fishing boats with the glazed expressions of people who had forgotten what dry skin felt like, and immediately caught the bus back.

The heat broke that afternoon with a storm that sent us scurrying off the balcony and indoors, where we discovered that the flat had excellent air conditioning and a television with approximately seven Italian channels showing football or cooking programmes. We chose cooking programmes and felt no shame whatsoever.

The following days became an exercise in adaptation, which sounds more noble than it was. We walked early, very early, shuffling along the shoreline in the grey half-light like a pair of determined pensioners. By ten we were back, swimming costumes on, heading to the beach with books we never quite managed to read because the heat made concentration impossible. The afternoons were for slow wandering through the town's grid of streets, finding shade where we could, eating gelato that melted faster than we could lick it.

One morning we walked south instead, towards the pineta, the pine forest that runs behind the coast. The path there was properly shaded, the air thick with resin and the sound of cicadas, and I found myself walking slower than necessary just to stay in that green coolness a little longer. It struck me, somewhere between thinking about lunch and swatting away a persistent fly, that this was what I had actually needed. Not the ambitious hikes, not the sense of achievement, just this. Moving through a place at the speed my body wanted to go, letting the weather dictate the rhythm rather than fighting it.

We did manage one longer walk on our final morning, a full stretch to the lighthouse at Goro, setting off at six-thirty when the air still carried something approaching freshness. My boots had by this point developed a smell that I can only describe as agricultural, and I had abandoned the moisture-wicking socks entirely in favour of cheap cotton ones bought from a supermarket. We walked for three hours, saw maybe six other people, and returned to find the baker just opening his shop, the first batch of piadine still warm.

I ate mine on the balcony, watching the beach fill up below, feeling the heat build again. The wrong turn at the start of the week felt like weeks ago, part of some other holiday entirely. I had come wanting to conquer the coast on foot, to stride purposefully from point to point, and had ended up instead learning to move slowly, to seek shade, to let the day unfold as it wanted to. It was not the walking holiday I had planned, but it was absolutely the one I needed.