I have never been more grateful for a sat nav than I was driving into Modica. We had flown into Comiso, picked up our hire car, and set off full of confidence and empty of any useful sense of direction. Within twenty minutes we were hopelessly lost down a lane barely wider than a wheelie bin, staring up at what I am fairly certain was someone's washing line but which, in my panicked state, I briefly mistook for festive bunting. My partner was navigating with the map on her phone, which kept spinning round like a confused compass and announcing we had arrived at our destination while we were clearly parked in front of a garage selling agricultural machinery.

The actual property, when we finally found it, sat at the end of a modest lane on the edge of town, a low stone building with terracotta pots and that particular dusty stillness you only get in Sicilian afternoons. I stumbled out of the car, knees still vibrating from the drive, and immediately noticed the smell. Not the car. Not me. The place itself. Warm stone, dried herbs, something faintly citrus drifting from a tree I could not yet identify. My first proper breath of Modica, and I nearly burst into tears of relief.

The key was in a lockbox, which I fumbled with for an embarrassingly long time, convinced I had forgotten the code already. The door opened onto a cool, tiled space that felt instantly like somewhere you could actually live, not just survive a week in. High ceilings, wooden beams, furniture that had the comfortable worn-ness of things actually used rather than staged for photographs. I ran my hand along the kitchen counter and realised, with a small private thrill, that this was going to be the heart of everything.

Because here is what I had not properly understood about self-catering in Sicily. It is not a compromise. It is not the budget option, the sad alternative to restaurants. It is an entirely different way of eating, one that starts the moment you locate the nearest market and ends, ideally, with you standing in a kitchen at midnight, slightly drunk on Nero d'Avola, eating bread that you bought that morning when it was still warm.

Our first morning, we walked into Modica Bassa, down steep streets that felt like descending into a secret. The market was not large, not tourist-pretty, just practical and loud and absolutely alive. An old woman was selling tomatoes that looked like they had been painted by someone with an excessive love of red. I bought two kilos because she insisted, gesturing at me with a severity that brooked no argument, and because I had no Italian beyond please, thank you, and a hopeful smile. We came away with ricotta still warm from the dairy, a hunk of caciocavallo that smelled like proper cheese rather than supermarket approximation, fat purple aubergines, and bunches of wild fennel that I kept lifting to my nose like some kind of herb-obsessed weirdo as we walked back up the hill.

That first lunch, we did barely anything. Bread, tomatoes ripped apart with my hands, ricotta drizzled with olive oil I found in the cupboard, which was peppery and extraordinary and which I later learned came from a farm three valleys over. We ate on the terrace, feet up, watching the afternoon light turn everything golden and slow. I kept thinking, I should do something. I should sightsee, be productive, have experiences. Instead I ate another piece of bread. The tomato juice ran down my wrist. I did not care.

By evening, ambition had struck. I had watched, in the market, a woman buying vast quantities of sardines with the air of someone who knew exactly what she was about. I bought some too, though mine were purchased with the air of someone hoping for the best. Back at the property, I found a cookbook in a cupboard, water-stained and Italian, and attempted to decipher a recipe for pasta con le sarde. The result was not elegant. I could not find pine nuts and substituted almonds with a recklessness I now recognise as hubris. The saffron, which I had bought in enthusiastic quantity, turned everything an alarming yellow. My partner watched me with the patient expression of someone who has seen this before and knows how the story ends.

We ate it anyway, on the terrace again, now lit by a single bulb that attracted moths and a gecko that parked itself on the wall with the settled air of a regular customer. The wine was cheap and excellent. The pasta was, objectively, a bit weird. The almonds were wrong, the saffron excessive, the whole thing slightly gluey from my nervous stirring. But the sardines were fresh, impossibly fresh, and somehow that carried everything. We finished the bottle. We finished the pasta. I sat there with my empty plate and felt, with the particular clarity that comes from moderate intoxication and holiday freedom, that this was exactly what I had come for.

The days that followed developed a rhythm I quickly grew addicted to. Morning market, always slightly different, always the same cast of characters. The serious cheese man. The woman with herbs arranged in precise bunches who corrected my pronunciation of origano with gentle brutality. The bakery where I bought ciabatta still singing from the oven, and once, disastrously, a sfincione that I attempted to reheat in an oven I had not yet properly mastered, resulting in something between edible and charcoal that we picked at anyway, standing in the kitchen, laughing with our mouths full of failure.

I tried making caponata one evening, having eaten it in a tiny place down a side street and become slightly obsessed. The recipe I cobbled together from the cookbook and some desperate Googling was probably inauthentic in six different ways. I fried aubergine until it absorbed roughly its own weight in oil. I added celery with uncertainty, olives with abandon, a splash of vinegar that made me cough dramatically and alarmed the gecko. It sat overnight in the fridge, as instructed by someone on the internet, and the next day at lunch it had transformed into something actually good, complex and sweet-sour and deeply savoury. I ate it with more bread, more wine, more of that peppery olive oil. I felt genuinely proud, which is absurd for a dish that essentially involves frying things and leaving them alone, but there it was.

The property's kitchen, I should say, was not fancy. No granite worktops, no fancy appliances, just good knives and solid pans and space to spread out. I cooked with the door open to the terrace, swatting occasionally at the persistent flies that seemed personally invested in my failure, listening to the distant sounds of someone else's afternoon. It felt like playing at being local, which I was aware was a performance, but one I enjoyed with uncomplicated pleasure.

One morning I attempted arancini, having watched a video the night before with the overconfidence of the slightly drunk. The rice stuck to everything. My hands were coated. The filling, which I had imagined as neat and contained, escaped in all directions. They fell apart in the oil, which spat viciously, and I ended up with something closer to crispy rice fragments than golden spheres of perfection. We ate them for lunch anyway, standing at the counter, picking up pieces with our fingers, and they were delicious in their disintegration, the ragu inside rich and reduced, the cheese stringing between us in a way that would have looked disgusting to anyone else but which felt like private triumph.

By the end of the week, I had not seen half the things I had planned. The Baroque churches, the chocolate shops Modica is famous for, the scenic viewpoints. I had seen the market at different hours, the kitchen in different lights, the inside of the local supermarket where I bought pasta and more wine and once, ambitiously, a whole rabbit that I stared at for ten minutes before admitting defeat and returning to chicken. I had eaten better than I had in months, and worse too, and both had mattered equally.

On our last evening, I made the simplest thing. Pasta with garlic, oil, chilli from a jar I had bought on impulse, finished with parsley I had forgotten about and found slightly wilted in the fridge drawer. We ate slowly, knowing it was the last time in that kitchen, on that terrace, with that particular view. The gecko made its final appearance, perhaps the same one, perhaps a succession of identical geckos I had never distinguished between. I raised my glass to it, to the week, to the tomatoes and the failed arancini and the yellow pasta and everything else. The wine was the same cheap one. It still tasted excellent. Some things, I was learning, do not need to change to stay perfect.