I have never been so relieved to see a man with a mop in my entire life.

The drive from Trieste Airport to Grado had been textbook Italian motoring: a Fiat Panda overtaking us on a roundabout, a brief argument with a satnav that insisted the lagoon was a shortcut, and my partner, Mark, confidently declaring "we're nearly there" for the forty-seventh time. The causeway stretched ahead like a promise, Grado rising from the water with its bell tower and terracotta roofs, and I allowed myself a small moment of smug satisfaction. We had booked a proper little flat, a proper Italian escape, somewhere to pretend we were interesting people who did things like buy fresh squid and know about wine.

The key collection point was a cafe near the harbour. Marco, the property manager, turned out to be a man in his sixties with eyebrows that deserved their own postcode and a habit of answering questions I hadn't asked yet. "You are English," he announced, not unkindly, sliding an espresso across the counter that I hadn't ordered. "The English always want to know about the washing machine. It is here." He tapped a photograph in the welcome pack with a fingernail that had seen serious manual labour. "Also, the English always break something. Try not to."

I laughed. He did not.

The flat itself was up two flights of stairs that narrowed like a funnel, each step a slightly different height, as if designed by someone who had only heard stairs described. I was carrying the heavy suitcase because Mark had "just popped to move the car," which in Mark-language meant "I have seen a gelateria and my willpower has dissolved." I rounded the final corner, misjudged the ceiling slope, and sent a potted geranium plummeting three storeys onto the cobblestones below.

The pot survived. The geranium did not. A small crowd materialised with the speed of a pantomime chorus.

Giovanna from the ground-floor flat appeared first, a woman of perhaps seventy wearing an apron that read "Kiss the Cook" in English, which felt pointed. She looked at the soil, looked at me, and said something in Friulian that I suspect was not complimentary. Then she laughed, a sound like gravel in a cement mixer, and produced a dustpan from nowhere.

"You are the English," she said. It was not a question.

Marco arrived with his mop, which he used to sweep the worst of the mess into a neat pile while explaining, at length, that this geranium had belonged to his cousin's mother-in-law, that it had survived a flood in 1996, and that I had now killed a piece of local history. He said all this with the resigned patience of a man who had watched many foreigners destroy many plants.

A boy of about twelve leaned out of the opposite window and offered commentary in rapid Italian that made Giovanna wheeze with laughter. "He says you have good aim," Marco translated. "For an English."

Mark returned during this, clutching two cones of stracciatella, to find me surrounded by what I can only describe as my new support group. He offered gelato around. Giovanna accepted with the gravity of a state occasion. Marco declined, citing professional standards, then took a lick of Giovanna's when he thought I wasn't looking.

By the time we actually entered the flat, half the street had been introduced. There was Enzo, who walked a dachshund named after a pope and who wanted to know if we supported West Ham because he had once been to London and seen a match. There was a woman called simply "la professoressa," retired now, who taught me the Friulian word for "clumsy" and made me repeat it until she was satisfied with my pronunciation. There was a man whose name I never caught but who communicated entirely through gestures and disapproving sniffs, and who seemed to live permanently on the step opposite, waiting for entertainment to arrive.

The flat was lovely. Small balcony, slightly wonky shutters, a kitchen where everything worked but nothing quite matched. I stood there with soil still under my fingernails, Mark handing me his melting gelato because his hands were full of keys and goodwill, and I thought: this is why we do this. Not for the perfect holiday brochure moment, but for the geranium, for Giovanna's apron, for Marco's eyebrows and his secret gelato theft.

We went out for dinner eventually, to a trattoria where the owner argued with us about whether we wanted the fish platter until we agreed that yes, actually, we did. But that first hour, standing in a cobbled street with a dead plant and a growing audience, was when Grado became ours. Not the postcard version. The real one, with its characters and its commentary and its complete lack of surprise that another English person had arrived and immediately broken something.

I bought a replacement geranium the next morning from a market stall. Giovanna helped me choose it. It died within the week, apparently from overwatering, though I suspect the pressure of expectation. She bought me a cactus after that. It is still alive. We send her photographs.