The drive down from Rome was meant to take an hour, tops. Two and a half hours later, my partner was giving me that look - you know the one - while I pretended the sat nav had definitely said "left at the abandoned petrol station" and not, as it turned out, "continue straight for eleven kilometres." We missed the turn for Nettuno twice. The third time, we found it mostly by accident after I spotted a man selling watermelons from a van and decided anyone that committed to summer fruit probably knew the area. He did. We were five minutes away.

Nettuno itself hit us like a warm towel fresh from the radiator. Not in a bad way - just that sudden, enveloping heat that makes you realise you've definitely packed the wrong trousers. The town sits on the Lazio coast with this unhurried, slightly scruffy charm that I immediately preferred to anywhere trying too hard. No glossy marina complexes here, just low buildings painted in that particular faded peach and cream that seems to exist only in Italian seaside towns, and enough fishing boats to remind you people actually work here.

Our place was one of those cottage-style holiday lets tucked into a residential street, the sort where you let yourself in with a key from a lockbox and spend the first ten minutes opening every cupboard out of nosiness. The owner had left us a bottle of local white wine and some slightly alarming homemade limoncello in a plastic bottle. "For your welcome," the note said. I poured a glass immediately. My partner raised an eyebrow. "It's five past four," she said. "It's somewhere," I replied, which remains my best contribution to marital diplomacy.

The mishap, though. I'd insisted on bringing my own pillow because I'm precious about sleep, and in my infinite wisdom had packed it in a supermarket bag on the roof rack "just for the journey." The bag was not, as I had assumed, tied down with anything resembling competence. We discovered this when a motorcyclist pulled alongside us on the coastal road, gesturing frantically. My pillow - my beloved, perfectly-dented pillow - was flapping like a dying seagull somewhere near Anzio. We never found it. I spent that first night on a spare cushion with the structural integrity of a pancake, quietly mourning my hubris.

But here's the thing about that cottage. It had a small terrace with a barbecue that looked like it had seen approximately four thousand sausages, and a view through neighbouring rooftops to a slice of sea that caught the evening light. The kitchen had tiles with a pattern I can only describe as enthusiastically 1970s. The shower required a degree in engineering. I loved it instantly. There was none of that anxious perfection of boutique hotels, just the comfortable, slightly worn reality of somewhere actually lived in, actually enjoyed.

We walked to the beach the next morning, me still slightly limoncello-fuzzy, passing a bakery where an old woman sold us warm cornetti without any English translation needed. The beach at Nettuno isn't polished. There's seaweed, there's the odd bit of plastic, there's local kids shouting and proper families with cool boxes and umbrellas that look older than I am. We lay on towels and I let the sun work on my pasty British shoulders while my children immediately buried each other in sand.

That first evening, we cooked simple pasta on the terrace, opened the proper wine, and watched the sky do that particular Mediterranean thing where it seems to take forever to get dark and then suddenly it's navy blue and full of bats. I thought about my pillow, briefly, and then I didn't. Some things you carry with you unnecessarily. Some things you can let go of somewhere on the Via Nettunense, flapping in the wind, and be better for it.

The limoncello, though. That came with us everywhere.