I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I confidently marched up to the wrong door in Cividale del Friuli and tried to unlock it with my NovaSOL key fob. The elderly gentleman inside looked utterly baffled as I stood there jiggling the handle, muttering about modern technology. Turned out our actual cottage was three doors down and looked nothing like it. My wife still brings this up at dinner parties.

The drive from Trieste Airport had been straightforward enough, winding through vineyards that clung to gentle hills like someone had draped green velvet over everything. Friuli feels different from the Italy you see on postcards. Less cypress trees and Renaissance perfection, more working countryside with a quiet confidence about it. We arrived in late afternoon, that golden hour when even a petrol station looks romantic, so you can imagine what the old stone buildings of Cividale were doing.

Our cottage sat on the edge of the historical centre, close enough to walk everywhere but tucked into a residential street where actual locals hung their washing out and shouted greetings across balconies. The sort of place where you feel slightly guilty about being a tourist, until you realise nobody minds as long as you do not block their parking space.

The first evening was pure cottage holiday rhythm. We unpacked badly, as families do, creating a explosion of cases in every room before anyone had worked out which bedroom was whose. The children discovered the garden, which was not enormous but had that slightly overgrown charm of somewhere maintained by someone who knows when to stop pruning. A fig tree leaned against the back wall. I have never successfully grown anything beyond mould, so I found this deeply impressive.

My wife sent me to find provisions, which in practice meant wandering the cobbled streets until I located a proper deli. The butcher looked at my attempt to order in phrasebook Italian with the patience of a man who has seen many British holidaymakers before. I came back with far more cheese than planned and some sliced meats I could not properly identify. We ate on the small terrace as the light faded, the kids bickering gently about who had the better chair, and I felt that particular contentment of having arrived somewhere that does not demand anything of you.

Cividale itself revealed itself slowly over those first days. The Devil's Bridge, which the children insisted on calling by its full name every single time. The old town centre with its Lombard heritage, layers of history that I pretended to understand while reading the same information board three times. We did not rush. That is the thing about a cottage holiday with family. The property becomes your base, your territory, and the holiday shapes itself around simple rhythms. Morning coffee in the garden. Late walks for gelato. That particular silence when everyone is reading or dozing after lunch.

I kept thinking about that wrong door, though. There was something fitting about it. Arriving somewhere new involves a certain amount of fumbling, of getting things slightly wrong before you settle in. By the end of the week, I knew which bakery opened first, where to get the best coffee, and exactly how long it took to walk back uphill after dinner. The cottage had become familiar, marked by our small habits, our scattered belongings, the particular arrangement of chairs we had worked out.

We left the key on the table as instructed, locked up carefully, and I checked the house number three times before walking to the car. Some lessons stick, apparently. The children fell asleep almost immediately, sun-tired and gelato-full. My wife and I drove in comfortable silence, already doing that thing where you start promising to come back before you have even properly left.