I have never been more grateful for a sat nav than I was trying to find our holiday let in Calci. We had flown into Pisa, picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of air freshener and regret, and set off with the sort of confidence that only comes from having watched one too many travel vlogs. The Tuscan countryside rolled past in that almost ridiculous way it does, all cypress trees and golden hills, and I was so busy pointing at a particularly handsome vineyard that I missed the turn entirely. My partner, who had been navigating using a phone with roughly three percent battery, gave me a look that I have since learned to call the Calci Stare. We ended up on a farm track, waved at by a very patient man on a tractor, and arrived at the property half an hour late and entirely too aware of our own ridiculousness.

The place itself was an old stone farmhouse divided into a few holiday apartments, ours being the one with the slightly wonky shutters and a terrace that looked out over olive groves. I will be honest: my first thought was not about the view, or the charming rustic furniture, or even the rather intimidating fireplace. It was about the kitchen. Specifically, the kitchen and what I was going to do with it.

We had decided, in that way you do on holiday, that we would cook properly. None of this popping out for pizza every night, we told ourselves. We were going to live like locals, shop like locals, eat like locals. I think I may have said something embarrassing about finding our inner nonna. The kitchen was compact but promising, with a decent hob, a fridge that hummed with ambition, and a collection of pans that had clearly seen some action.

The next morning we drove the few miles into Calci itself, a village that clings to the hillside with the relaxed attitude of somewhere that has been there for centuries and sees no particular reason to hurry now. The market was small, just a handful of stalls in the main square, but it was exactly the sort of market that makes you want to buy vegetables you do not know how to cook. I came away with aubergines that were almost comically glossy, tomatoes that smelled like actual tomatoes rather than the watery disappointments I was used to, a bunch of basil that I kept sniffing like a weirdo, and some local pecorino that the stallholder let me try with a look that said he had seen my type before.

That first lunch was a simple thing, just bread and cheese and tomatoes sliced roughly with a knife that was not quite sharp enough. We ate it on the terrace with some cheap local wine and I have to tell you, it was embarrassing how good it was. I say embarrassing because I have spent years in London kitchens trying to make food taste like this, with imported olive oils and fancy salts and all the rest of it, and here I was with four ingredients and a view of an olive grove, absolutely humiliated by a tomato.

The cooking attempts that followed were, shall we say, mixed. I had ambitions for the aubergines. I found a recipe in a battered book left by previous guests, something about layering them with tomato and cheese, and I set about it with the confidence of a man who had successfully made one good lunch. The aubergines turned out slightly rubbery. The cheese ratio was, in retrospect, excessive. My partner was kind about it in that way that somehow makes it worse. We ate it anyway, sitting on the terrace as the light went golden, and I had one of those moments of gentle self-reflection that holidays seem to invite. I was never going to be a Tuscan nonna. I was a man from Croydon with a slightly wonky kitchen and an overenthusiastic approach to cheese, and perhaps that was fine.

The following days found a better rhythm. We discovered the butcher in Calci who sold proper wild boar sausages, dense and fragrant with fennel, and I learned to cook them simply with white beans from a jar and lots of garlic. We found a bakery that did bread with a proper crust, the sort that fights back when you cut it. I made a risotto with porcini mushrooms that I had dried myself from a market find, standing at the hob and stirring with a wooden spoon that had been worn smooth by other holidaymakers' hands, and it was actually decent. Not transcendent, not life-changing, but decent. I was genuinely proud in a way that felt slightly pathetic.

There was a small supermarket on the edge of the village where we went for staples, and I became weirdly invested in their pasta selection, standing in the aisle comparing bronze-extruded this and artisanal that like I knew what I was talking about. We bought wine in boxes because we were there for two weeks and the maths made sense, and I do not care what anyone says, that wine was perfectly drinkable and got better with every glass.

The highlight, though, was a meal we did not cook ourselves. A neighbour at the farmhouse, an Italian woman from Milan who had been coming for years, invited us over for dinner on her terrace. She made pappa al pomodoro, that thick Tuscan bread and tomato soup, and watching her tear stale bread into it with the casual expertise of someone who had done this a hundred times, I understood something about cooking that my recipe books had never quite conveyed. It was not about the aubergines or the bronze extrusion or any of that. It was about repetition, and patience, and not trying too hard to impress.

We finished our stay with a final market trip, loading up on pecorino and sausages to take home, though I knew even then that they would not taste the same in my Croydon kitchen. The sat nav got us back to Pisa without incident, though I did miss one turn and my partner did give me the Calci Stare one last time. Some things, I suppose, do not change.