I should have known the holiday was going to be character-building when I put the postcode into my sat nav and it tried to send me up a tractor path that definitely wasn't on any official map of Emilia Romagna. Three-point turns in a hire car on a narrow lane with a stone wall on one side and a very judgmental goat on the other wasn't quite the glamorous Italian arrival I'd pictured.

The Riserva Naturale Ghirardi sits in the hills above Parma, surrounded by oak woods and meadows that roll on like someone's unfurled a particularly green carpet. I'd booked it thinking mainly of the pool and perhaps a bit of gentle pottering. What I hadn't properly clocked was that this is serious walking country, and I'd arrived in late June when the weather was having something of an identity crisis.

The first morning dawned bright and almost aggressively cheerful. I packed my rucksack with what I considered appropriate hiking provisions: water, a sun hat I'd bought in a hurry at the airport, and an ambitious number of snacks. The reserve itself has marked trails winding through the woodlands, and I'd planned to tackle the longer loop that supposedly offered views down toward the valley. I made it approximately forty minutes before the sky, which had been cloudless at breakfast, suddenly assembled itself into something that looked like a particularly grey cauliflower. The rain came down with the kind of enthusiasm you normally associate with children at a birthday party. I sheltered under an oak tree and ate two cereal bars in rapid succession, which I can confirm is not a recognised mindfulness technique.

Back at the property, I dripped onto the terrace and reconsidered my approach. The lovely thing about staying somewhere like this is that you're not really anywhere you need to be. The pool, when the sun returned an hour later, was genuinely glorious - not one of those freezing plunges that British people pretend to enjoy, but properly swimmable. I spent the afternoon doing very little indeed, which felt like its own small victory.

The second attempt at walking came two days later. I'd become slightly obsessed with a local chap at the village bar who kept gesturing toward what he called "la costa," by which he meant the ridge line rather than anywhere near the sea. Emilia Romagna does have coastal stretches further east, but up here in the Parma hills, you're playing with a different definition altogether. I set off earlier this time, chasing cooler temperatures, and found a trail that climbed steadily through beech woods before emerging onto open grassland. The views were ridiculous in the best way - layers of hills fading into blue distance, the occasional stone farmhouse looking like it had grown straight out of the ground.

What struck me was how the weather here doesn't so much change as negotiate. That morning started misty, burned off to genuine warmth by ten, then a breeze arrived around midday that made the walking genuinely pleasant rather than an endurance test. I passed nobody for two hours except a woman gathering wild herbs who nodded at me with the resigned patience of someone who sees plenty of underprepared tourists.

By my final day, I'd settled into a rhythm that felt almost local. Morning walks before the heat built, afternoons by the pool with a book I'd been meaning to finish for eighteen months, evenings cooking simple things from the village shop and eating on the terrace as the light went soft and golden. I'd stopped trying to outsmart the weather and started treating it as a slightly unpredictable walking companion. The holiday I ended up having was nothing like the one I'd planned, and was substantially better for it.