I should have known the holiday was off to a classic start when I confidently marched up to a rust-red Fiat in the Catania airport car park, clicked the key fob, and stood there baffled as nothing happened. Three attempts later, a Sicilian gentleman tapped my shoulder and gestured politely to his actual car, parked one row behind. My rental was the dented white Punto wheezing in the corner. So began our family break in Ispica, me already slightly pink from embarrassment and the midday heat.

The drive south took us through landscapes that looked like someone had left the oven on too long. Golden fields, parched hills, the occasional stubborn olive tree clinging on for dear life. The children had given up asking "are we there yet" somewhere around Modica and had moved on to a competitive silence that felt more threatening than any tantrum. My partner navigated while I gripped the steering wheel, still smarting from the Fiat incident and squinting against the sun that seemed personally offended by my British complexion.

We found our holiday home tucked down a lane on the edge of Ispica, a low stone building with a terrace that looked out towards distant hills. The key was exactly where the instructions said, which felt like a small miracle after my parking lot performance. Pushing open the door, that particular coolness hit you first, the kind that only thick old walls can provide. The children bolted past me, claiming bedrooms with the territorial urgency of colonial powers. I stood in the kitchen with its terracotta tiles and slightly wonky cupboard doors and felt something unknot in my shoulders.

The pool was smaller than it had appeared in photos, naturally, but the children were already in it shrieking before I'd even located the outdoor light switch. I made a mental note to actually read the welcome folder rather than pretending I had, which is my usual holiday tradition. My partner opened a bottle of local Nero d'Avola that we'd picked up from a roadside enoteca, and we stood on that terrace watching the light change over the countryside, the children now somehow transformed into charming creatures after their swim.

Ispica itself revealed itself slowly over those first hours. We wandered down for bread in the early evening, the town climbing uphill in a jumble of baroque facades and narrow passages. A group of old men sat outside a bar, solving problems I couldn't understand, their chairs arranged like a parliament in permanent session. The bakery smelled of warm sesame and aniseed, and I managed to order four rolls using approximately seventeen words when three would have done, flourishing my phrasebook like a shield.

That first night we cooked simple pasta with tomatoes and basil from a nearby greengrocer, ate outside under a sky thick with stars you simply don't see at home, and listened to the strange silence of a place without constant traffic hum. The children fell asleep at the table, pasta sauce still on their chins. I carried them to bed, my back complaining, feeling that particular tiredness that comes from actual doing rather than the weary fatigue of routine.

Lying in bed later, mosquito net doing its wobbly best, I thought about how I'd arrived flustered and ridiculous, wrong car and sunburn already setting in, and how quickly that had dissolved into something else. The mishaps hadn't mattered. They never really do, I suppose, though I forget that constantly in ordinary life. Here, with thick walls and thin sheets and the distant sound of someone's television drifting through warm air, the important things shrank down beautifully small. Bread, water, a pool to jump in, people you love being silly together.

I woke to my youngest standing beside the bed at dawn, already in swimming costume, asking if Sicily had breakfast. I said yes, definitely, though I had no idea yet where to find it. We'd work it out. We always do.