I have never been so relieved to see a pastel-coloured villa in all my life. The drive from Genoa Airport had been straightforward enough until I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that I could navigate the final stretch without GPS. "I have a good sense of direction," I told my partner, who made a noise like a deflating lilo. Forty minutes later we were halfway up a goat track above Zoagli, surrounded by olive groves and regret, with a hire Fiat that was developing an alarming relationship with the clutch.

We finally limped into Rapallo proper just as the afternoon was turning golden, and there it was: our holiday home, perched on the hillside with terracotta roofs and enough bougainvillea to stage an opera. I had never loved a building so passionately. My partner said nothing, but patted my knee in the manner of someone comforting a fool.

The key handover was handled by a man called Franco, who appeared from next door with a small dog under one arm and a limoncello under the other. He was seventy if he was a day, dressed in trousers that had seen better decades, and he regarded our Fiat with the expression of a man who had watched many tourists make poor automotive choices. "You came the scenic route," he said, which I have since learned is Ligurian for "you are an idiot."

Franco's English was approximately as good as my Italian, which is to say we communicated in a magnificent hybrid of shouting, gestures, and occasional French. He showed us the terrace, the washing machine, the complicated arrangement of bins that apparently required a PhD, and all the while his dog, a terrier of indeterminate breed called Beppe, regarded us with profound suspicion. "Beppe does not like Germans," Franco announced at one point, apropos of nothing. We are not German, but I did not feel this was the moment to clarify.

The neighbours began appearing almost immediately. There was Signora Rossi from the villa above, who leaned over her balcony to shout down that we had parked badly, then immediately followed this with an invitation to coffee the following morning. "She is like this," Franco explained, making a gesture I interpreted as "unpredictable but fundamentally benevolent." Another man, who introduced himself only as "the Marco who fixes boats," wandered past to borrow a ladder and stayed for twenty minutes explaining why British people misunderstand pesto. I did not point out that I consider pesto one of Britain's greatest culinary achievements, because Marco had kind eyes and I wanted him to like me.

By evening we were settled on the terrace with a bottle of local Vermentino, watching the lights come on across the bay. The mishap of the afternoon already felt like somebody else's story, or at least like a story I could laugh about rather than wince. Franco had left us with a bowl of lemons from his own tree, a set of instructions about the boiler that I have yet to fully decode, and the lingering impression that we had been adopted by a man who collects stray tourists the way other people collect stamps.

I sat there listening to the cicadas and the distant clatter of somebody's dinner preparations, and I thought about how holidays often reveal the gap between the person you imagine yourself to be and the person you actually are. I imagine myself as competent, unflappable, good with directions. The reality is more complicated. But sitting on that terrace, slightly wine-happy and thoroughly inspected by Beppe from the neighbouring wall, I found I did not much mind. The scenic route, after all, had brought me here. And here, with its lemon-scented evenings and its unsolicited advice about bin collection, felt exactly like the right place to be.