I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I missed the turning for Partinico three times in a row. The first time I blamed the sat nav, which had apparently decided we fancied a scenic tour of every olive grove in western Sicily. The second time I blamed my partner, who was meant to be navigating but had got distracted by a roadside stall selling what he swore were the best cannoli in the province. The third time I had nobody to blame but myself, because I was too busy waving back at an elderly man on a scooter who had taken it upon himself to escort us through the village like some kind of two-wheeled guardian angel.

We finally rolled up to the property in a state of mild hysteria, only to discover that our host, Salvatore, had been watching our progress from his balcony with a cup of coffee and what I can only describe as the patience of a man who had seen this exact scene play out a hundred times before. He ambled down to greet us, kissed both my cheeks before I could protest, and immediately began apologising for the state of the garden. I looked around at the bougainvillea tumbling over the terrace and the lemon trees heavy with fruit and wondered what exactly he was comparing it to. Buckingham Palace, perhaps.

Salvatore's English was roughly on par with my Italian, which is to say we communicated in a glorious mixture of hand gestures, mispronounced words, and occasional shouting when we got excited. Within twenty minutes he had established that my partner was a "good man" because he had admired the tomatoes, that I was "too thin" because I had declined a second slice of his wife's almond cake, and that we absolutely must meet his cousin Giuseppe who would be passing by later with some fresh swordfish.

Giuseppe arrived not with swordfish but with a dog the size of a small horse and an opinion about everything. He spoke rapid Sicilian that even Salvatore occasionally struggled to follow, and he took an immediate interest in our rental car, which he inspected with the scepticism of a man who clearly thought anything without a Fiat badge was barely a vehicle at all. He told us, via Salvatore's increasingly creative translations, that we had chosen well with Partinico. "Not like Palermo," he said, with a dismissive wave that somehow encompassed an entire city. "Here, people still know how to live." He said this while perched on our garden wall, eating our grapes without invitation, and I found myself rather agreeing with him.

The neighbour on our other side, a tiny woman called Rosa who must have been well into her eighties, made her introduction by passing a bowl of just-picked figs over the fence without a word. When I tried to thank her in my phrasebook Italian, she corrected my pronunciation with the precision of a retired schoolteacher, which I later discovered she actually was. She returned every morning after that with some new offering and some new correction, until my pronunciation of "grazie" became almost passable and my waistband became definitely less so.

By the end of our first evening, sitting on that terrace with Salvatore's homemade wine and Giuseppe's dog snoring at our feet, I realised something that surprised me. I am usually the sort of person who plans holidays down to the nearest restaurant review, who gets anxious when things deviate from the itinerary. Yet here I was, thoroughly lost, slightly sunburned, being told I was too thin by a man whose wife's cake I had already eaten twice, and I had never felt more properly on holiday. The mishaps had not been obstacles to the experience. They had been the experience, or at least the doorway into it.

I raised my glass to Salvatore, who was explaining something complicated about olive harvesting that I only half understood, and decided that whatever else this week brought, I would try to meet it with the same unhurried goodwill that seemed to come so naturally to everyone I had met here. Rosa's figs, I suspected, were only the beginning.