I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Costermano sul Garda did not disappoint. We had flown into Verona, picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of parmesan and regret, and set off toward Lake Garda with the confident optimism of people who had not bothered to check whether their sat nav understood Italian road names. Within twenty minutes we were hopelessly lost somewhere near a vineyard, arguing about whether "Costermano" was pronounced with the stress on the second syllable or the third. My partner insisted on the third. A local farmer, who watched us perform a seventeen-point turn in his driveway, seemed to disagree with both of us entirely.

By the time we found the holiday home, perched on its hillside with views down to the lake, I had worked myself into that particular state of travel frazzle where everything feels like a personal insult. The key safe would not open. The sun was doing that aggressive Mediterranean thing where it somehow feels personal too. I may have uttered a word that shall not be repeated in polite company. Then the safe clicked, the door swung open, and I stepped onto a terrace that smelled of jasmine and warm stone, and suddenly the wrong turnings and the key safe and even the pronunciation debate seemed like necessary preamble. The lake below was doing that impossible blue that makes you understand why painters kept coming back here. I stood there with my suitcase still in the car and my mouth actually open, which my partner found hilarious and photographed for future blackmail.

We had arrived in late May with ambitious plans for serious hiking. The Monte Baldo ridge was calling, apparently, and I had packed walking boots with the earnest intention of using them properly. That first evening we walked down to the lakeside path, just a gentle wander to stretch our legs after the journey, and I remember thinking how clever we had been with our timing. The weather was perfect, that soft warmth that makes you want to stay outside forever. We stopped at a little bar in Garda town and drank spritzes and watched the light change on the water, and I made bold pronouncements about tomorrow's long coastal trek to Malcesine.

The morning brought thick grey cloud and a wind that felt distinctly un-May-like. I stood on the terrace in shorts and a t-shirt, clutching my coffee, while my partner wisely retreated to find a jumper. By midday the rain had settled in with the determination of a guest who does not know when to leave. Our serious hiking plans dissolved into a soggy stroll to the nearest bakery, where we bought focaccia and ate it in the car with the heaters on, watching the lake disappear entirely into mist. I felt briefly cheated by the weather, as if Italy had broken some unwritten contract, but there is something about rain on warm stone that smells extraordinary, and the baker was so sympathetic about our ruined plans that he gave us an extra piece of torta di limone.

The following days taught us to follow the weather rather than fight it. We became experts at reading the morning sky, at knowing when the clouds would lift enough for a proper walk and when we should simply head down to the water's edge and wait. The lakeside path from Costermano to Bardolino became our regular route, flat enough to manage in any conditions, winding through olive groves and past little beaches where we could stop and dip our feet when the sun broke through. I grew embarrassingly fond of a particular bench near Punta San Vigilio, where we would sit with takeaway coffee and watch the ferry boats cross between impossible shades of blue and grey.

There was a morning, I remember, when we set off early for the path toward Torri del Benaco, full of intention, only to be turned back by a thunderstorm that rolled down from the mountains with theatrical speed. We sheltered under a cypress tree that offered approximately no protection whatsoever, laughing and getting properly soaked, and I had one of those moments of clarity that only seem to come when you are slightly uncomfortable and far from home. I realised that my obsession with completing the proper hike, with ticking off the ridge walk and earning the view, had been missing the point entirely. The holiday was not in the achievement. It was in the damp scramble back to the car, in the shared absurdity, in the way the light came through afterwards and made everything look newly washed and precious.

When the warm weather finally settled properly, in our last few days, we did manage some longer walks. The coastal path toward Malcesine, when we finally completed it, was everything I had hoped for, climbing and falling through lemon groves and past little harbours where fishing boats bobbed. But I think I preferred the smaller walks, the improvised ones, the setting out without a fixed destination and seeing where the path and the weather took us. We found a tiny chapel above the lake that I never learned the name of, and a family-run winery where the owner made us try his olive oil on plain bread and talked for twenty minutes about his grandfather's pruning methods.

On our final evening we walked down to the lake one last time, the air still warm from the day, the water completely still. My boots were by now thoroughly broken in and slightly muddy from an unexpected detour through a vineyard. I thought about the journey here, the lost sat nav, the key safe, the rain that had seemed like such an obstacle and turned out to be the thing that shaped everything worth remembering. We had come for the grand panoramic hikes, the postcard views from the top. We had stayed for the wrong turns, the sheltering under trees, the slow discovery of a place by walking through it without too much plan. I finished my spritz and decided that "Costermano" probably sounds best when you say it with a bit of uncertainty anyway, and my partner, mercifully, did not photograph that particular expression.