I have never been so happy to see a place with no postcode. Three hours after leaving Genoa airport, my partner and I were still arguing with a hire car sat nav that insisted Camporosso was somewhere in the sea. We had already missed one turning, circled a roundabout twice while a local on a scooter watched with visible amusement, and I had managed to spill an entire cappuccino into my lap at a petrol station near Imperia. The stain looked embarrassingly biological. I told myself it would dry before anyone saw it.

The approach to the property told us nothing useful. Narrow lanes, olive groves pressing in from both sides, the occasional cat giving us a look of profound judgement. Then suddenly the road opened up and there it was, perched on the hillside with a view that made me forget I was sitting in wet coffee. The place had that particular Ligurian quality of looking slightly chaotic from the outside and impossibly charming once you got closer. Terracotta pots everywhere. A bougainvillea doing its best to take over the terrace. The sort of place where you immediately start calculating how many books you could read in a week.

Our host had left the key under a terracotta frog. I am not making this up. A ceramic frog with a slightly malevolent expression guarded our holiday. The door opened with a satisfying creak and we stepped into cool tile floors and that particular silence you only get in old Italian houses with thick walls. I stood there for a moment, still holding my bag, suddenly aware of how fast I had been moving for months. The frog watched me from outside. I decided not to take it personally.

The terrace became our headquarters. Mornings started slowly, always slowly, with coffee that actually tasted of something and bread from the bakery in Camporosso village, a ten-minute wander down lanes that smelled of rosemary and warm stone. I had brought four books and finished three. My partner developed an obsession with a lizard that lived near the outdoor shower and named it Giovanni before we realised there were at least four Giovannis rotating through the same spot. We never learned to tell them apart. It did not matter.

Some days we walked to the village for supplies, though supplies mostly meant more bread, more tomatoes, more of that cheap vermentino that tasted expensive on the terrace. The village itself is nothing dramatic, which is precisely its charm. A few shops, locals who nodded at us by day three, a bar where an old man explained football transfers to his friend with the intensity of a war correspondent. We understood perhaps thirty percent. We stayed for an hour.

The beach at Camporosso is not the polished affair you find further east. It is pebbly, slightly scruffy, with water that takes a moment to get used to then suddenly feels perfect. We went twice, maybe three times. Mostly we did not bother. The terrace had shade when you wanted it, sun when you did not, and a view of the sea that changed colour through the day without ever demanding your attention. I spent one entire afternoon watching a hawk circle the hillside opposite. I cannot tell you if it caught anything. I suspect that was not the point.

By the end of the week I had stopped checking my phone. The coffee stain never fully came out of those trousers. I wore them anyway. The frog still had the key when we left, still looking faintly disapproving, still utterly indifferent to our departure. I have never been more grateful for a holiday that asked so little of me.