I have never been more grateful for a sat nav's patience than during our approach to Ragusa, where I managed to miss the same turning three times while arguing with my partner about whether "strada bianca" meant white road or just road for white people. It means unpaved road, as it turns out, and I was about to become intimately acquainted with every bump and rut between us and our holiday home.

The property sat on the edge of Ibla, the old town, though "sat" suggests a composure it did not possess. It clung, really, to a hillside that seemed perpetually surprised to find buildings upon it. Our host, Salvatore, emerged from a side door before I had even finished wrestling my suitcase from the boot, which I took as either extraordinary hospitality or him having watched my three-point turn debacle from his kitchen window.

"Ah, Inglese," he said, though I had not spoken. This would become a theme. Salvatore possessed that particular Sicilian gift of knowing things about you before you revealed them, a sort of benign omniscience powered by strong coffee and stronger opinions. He led us through a courtyard where lemon trees sagged under fruit the size of cricket balls, pausing to scold a ginger cat he called Commissario, who ignored him with the practiced disdain of a creature who had heard it all before.

The first floor apartment opened onto a terrace that made me actually say "blimey" out loud, something I had not done since 2008. The view tumbled down through terracotta roofs to the baroque confection of Ibla below, all honeyed stone and impossible churches. Salvatore watched me watch it, smoking a cigarette he had produced from nowhere.

"You will eat at Duomo," he announced. Not a question. I started to explain we had not planned anything yet, but he held up his hand. "No. You will eat at Duomo. I call Ciccio. He has table." And somehow, before I had even located the kettle, I had a dinner reservation and a man named Ciccio expecting me.

The mishap came later, when I attempted to operate the espresso machine Salvatore had proudly demonstrated. What followed was a sound like a distressed cappuccino and a jet of coffee that arced across the kitchen with ballistic precision, catching me squarely on my only clean shirt. Salvatore, drawn by my yelp, surveyed the scene without visible surprise.

"The machine, she is temperamental," he said, though his expression suggested the machine was not the temperamental party in this exchange. He produced a towel and a replacement shirt from somewhere, a faded thing advertising a ragu festival from 2019. "You wear. Is better."

I spent that first afternoon wandering Ibla in my ragu shirt, feeling faintly ridiculous and entirely visible. At the piazza, an elderly man on a bench called out to ask if the festival had been good. When I explained the borrowing, he nodded sagely. "Salvatore, he collects these things. Like a magpie with rubbish." He introduced himself as Enzo, retired now from some profession he declined to specify, and spent twenty minutes critiquing my walking shoes with the frankness only possible between strangers who will never meet again.

By evening, the shirt had become a conversation piece. Ciccio at Duomo greeted me with it before my name, laughing with his whole body, a man who appeared to find genuine joy in the absurdity of tourists. He seated us near the kitchen where we could hear him directing staff with operatic volume, pausing only to emerge and ask whether I understood that ragu in Sicily meant something different from Bologna. I did not. He explained. I still do not, entirely, but I laughed where required and ate something extraordinary involving pistachios and prawns.

The mishap with the coffee machine came to feel like a necessary introduction, a small humiliation that opened doors. Salvatore's cousin appeared the next morning with pastries, explaining she had heard about the "espresso incident" and felt I needed feeding. The ragu shirt went into my permanent collection, though I suspect Salvatore has forgotten it entirely, already accumulating some other tourist's embarrassment in his magpie hoard.

I arrived in Ragusa planning to be an observer, to watch this baroque town from a careful distance. Instead, I was absorbed into its current of conversation and commentary, my coffee-stained incompetence becoming currency in a place where character matters more than competence. The view from that terrace still catches me when I remember it, but it is Salvatore's hand raised in greeting, Enzo's critique of my footwear, Ciccio's laughter ricocheting through his restaurant, that define what it meant to arrive there. I came for the honeyed stone and found the people who animated it, slightly ridiculous myself and utterly welcomed for being so.