I have never been so relieved to see a set of keys in a lockbox as I was when we finally rocked up at our Roma holiday let. The journey from Stansted had been one of those classic budget airline specials: up at four, soggy Pret sandwich for breakfast, and a chap behind us who spent the full two and a half hours explaining cryptocurrency to his deeply uninterested wife. By the time we landed at Ciampino, I was already dreaming of a cold Peroni and a horizontal position.

The mishap, though. Oh, the mishap. We had decided to be clever and get the bus from the airport to Termini, then the metro to somewhere near the property. Clever, we were not. I had screenshotted the directions in a rush at Gatwick, and only realised halfway through the metro journey that I had saved the wrong exit. We popped up near the Colosseum instead of our actual neighbourhood, which would have been lovely had we not been hauling a wheelie bag with a wonky wheel and a rucksack bursting with duty-free limoncello. My partner gave me that look. You know the one. The "I love you but you are an absolute liability" look. We ended up sharing a taxi with a lovely nonna who kept patting my arm and saying "poverino" as if I were a small lost dog rather than a grown man who cannot use Google Maps properly.

The apartment itself sits in a proper residential pocket of the city, well away from the tourist scrums but still unmistakably Roman. The sort of area where balconies overflow with geraniums and every street corner has a bar with a coffee machine that sounds like a steam train and produces espresso that could wake the dead. Our building was the faded ochre colour that everything seems to be in this part of Lazio, with a heavy wooden door that required a shove from the shoulder to open. I loved it immediately.

Inside, the flat had that particular Italian smell of polished tile and something faintly herby from the kitchen. The ceilings were high enough to make our London flat feel like a storage cupboard, and the shutters on the windows were the proper old wooden sort that clatter dramatically when you fold them back. I flung ours open with theatrical intent, nearly decapitating a pigeon on the neighbouring balcony, and there it was: a view of terracotta rooftops and satellite dishes and a slice of distant hill that I later learned was part of the Alban Hills. Not postcard Rome, but real Rome. Living, breathing, slightly chaotic Rome.

The kitchen was compact but serious about its purpose. A proper moka pot, not one of those novelty sized ones. Olive oil in a tin, not a bottle. The fridge hummed with the enthusiasm of an appliance that has seen several decades of service. I found myself grinning like an idiot at all of it. This was exactly the sort of place where you would buy bread from the forno around the corner, where you would learn which bar does the better cornetto, where you would pretend to be a local even as your atrocious pronunciation of "grazie" gave you away every single time.

That first evening, we did not attempt anything ambitious. A wander to the nearest piazza, a spritz that cost half what it would in Soho, the realisation that we had not thought about work emails for at least six hours. The wonky wheel on the suitcase had somehow become funny rather than infuriating. The wrong metro exit had gifted us an accidental glimpse of ancient grandeur. Even my map incompetence felt, in that golden evening light, like the sort of small human failing that travel is supposed to forgive.

I stood on that little balcony later, listening to someone practising violin a few floors up and someone else arguing about football from a window across the street, and I thought: this is why we do it. The hassle, the early starts, the wonky wheels and wrong turns. For this feeling of having briefly borrowed someone else's daily life, of being somewhere that does not belong to you but welcomes you anyway. We had arrived, finally, properly, and Rome was already working its slow magic.