I have never been so relieved to see a bungalow as I was when we finally rolled up to Lido Di Spina last August. The journey from Bologna had been straightforward enough until I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that I could navigate us the final stretch without GPS. "I have a feel for these coastal roads," I told my partner, who made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a warning. Forty minutes later we were deep in what I can only describe as agricultural nowhere, surrounded by flat fields and the occasional suspicious goat. My feel for coastal roads, it turns out, extends exclusively to Devon.

We arrived flustered, dusty, and bickering about whose fault it was that we missed the turning for the lagoon road. The woman checking us in was called Carla, and she took one look at us and said something in rapid Italian that I later learned roughly translated to "English, lost, always." She was not wrong. She handed over keys with the theatrical weariness of someone who had performed this exact ritual a thousand times before, then pointed at a noticeboard covered in handwritten rules and smiled as if to say, good luck with all that.

Our neighbour was already settled on his terrace, a man in his seventies called Franco who wore sunglasses that belonged on a film star half his age and half his girth. He was eating cherries from a paper bag and spitting the stones into a plant pot with surgical precision. "You are the lost English," he announced, not looking up. Word travelled fast. I admitted we were. He offered me a cherry and explained, in surprisingly good English learned from decades of BBC World Service, that he had been coming to this exact strip of Lido Di Spina since 1983. "Every year, same bungalow, same terrible mattress, same beautiful silence." He patted the plastic chair beside him and I sat, because refusing seemed impossible.

The silence, I should say, was relative. The cicadas were having some kind of tournament. Franco talked me through the local cast of characters as if reading from a programme. The man who cycled past every morning at seven with a cat in his front basket. The German couple who argued spectacularly every Tuesday. The woman who ran the nearest gelateria and judged your flavour choices with visible disappointment. "She is the real mayor here," Franco said. "Forget the comune."

That evening we walked to the beach, still disoriented from the journey and the heat. A younger man was fishing from the shore, thigh-deep in warm water, cigarette dangling. He called out asking if we had mosquito repellent, which seemed an odd opener until he explained he had promised his girlfriend he would catch their dinner and so far had managed one tiny fish and fourteen bites. I lent him my spray. He repaid me with directions to the only bakery that opened before eight, plus a warning about the baker himself. "He talks. You must be ready to talk back, or he is offended."

The baker, when we found him the next morning, was indeed talkative. His name was Aldo and he had opinions about everything, delivered while weighing dough with the focused intensity of a bomb disposal expert. English football, he informed me, was finished. The pasta in tourist restaurants, finished. The quality of this year's peaches, also finished, though he sold me four anyway and told me to eat them that day or not at all. I believed him. There was something about Aldo that made you want to believe everything, if only to keep him talking.

By our third day I understood what Franco meant about the rhythm of the place. The same faces, the same brief exchanges that somehow contained entire histories. The woman at the small supermarket who remembered I wanted sparkling water, not still. The old man who walked his dog at precisely six every evening and tipped his hat, though we had never spoken. These small recognitions accumulated into something that felt, improbably, like belonging.

I thought about this on our last morning, packing the car with considerably more competence than we had arrived. Franco appeared with a paper bag of cherries. "For the road," he said. "Try not to get lost." I wanted to explain that getting lost was how we had found any of this, but my Italian failed me, and perhaps it did not matter. Some things do not need translating.