I should have known the sat-nav was plotting against me the moment it sent us down a gravel track barely wide enough for a Fiat Panda, let alone our hired Renault. "Recalculating," it chirped, as if that made up for the fact we were now wedged between two cypress trees with a very judgmental goat watching from a stone wall. My partner, ever the optimist, suggested we ask the goat for directions. I suggested we abandon the car and start our walking holiday three miles early.

We were bound for Camaiore, a proper Tuscan town tucked between the Apuan Alps and the coast, where we'd booked one of those converted stone farmhouses that look idyllic online and slightly more crumbly in person. The website had promised "rustic charm," which I now understand is estate agent speak for "door frames you will definitely bump your head on."

The gravel track eventually spat us out onto a proper road, and we wound down through olive groves that shimmered silver-green in the afternoon heat. Proper heat, mind you, not the damp British approximation. Thirty-two degrees according to the dashboard, which felt less like a temperature and more like a personal challenge.

Our first morning, we woke absurdly early thanks to jet lag and the neighbour's enthusiastic cockerel. By six, we were already pacing the kitchen, drinking coffee thick enough to stand a spoon in, studying maps of the coastal paths. The plan was ambitious: a full day's hike from Viareggio north towards Torre del Lago, sticking to the pine-backed trails that separate the beach from the marshlands behind. Twelve miles, we'd reckoned, with a swim at midday and seafood lunch somewhere picturesque.

We made it approximately forty minutes before the weather turned theatrical.

One moment we were strolling through pineta woodland, scent of warm resin everywhere, the sort of morning that makes you understand why people write poetry about Italy. The next, the sky had curdled from blue to bruised purple, and we were sprinting for a beach cafe as thunder cracked directly overhead. The proprietor, utterly unbothered, simply moved our coffees inside and handed us a towel without being asked. Apparently this was normal. Apparently July in Tuscany involves storms that arrive like dramatic relatives at Christmas, loud and impossible to ignore.

We spent two hours watching the rain turn the beach grey and listening to the proprietor explain, in magnificent detail, why the coastal paths flood and why only mad English people attempt them in July. His nephew, he said, drove a taxi to Forte dei Marmi when the weather cleared. We could walk the promenade there, have a proper lunch, pretend we'd meant to do this all along.

There's something humbling about having your ambitious hiking plans gently dismantled by a man who has seen too many soggy tourists. We took the taxi. We ate linguine alle vongole in a restaurant where the waiter called us "brave" for our morning's efforts, though his tone suggested "foolish" was the intended word. We walked back along the promenade as the storm cleared, the Apuan Alps suddenly visible and sharp against the washed sky, marble-white peaks catching the returning sun.

That became our rhythm, in the end. Early starts before the heat built, coastal paths when the forecast held steady, beach cafes and promenade strolls when it didn't. We walked the shorter pine trails near Lido di Camaiore, where the shade stays thick until midday and you can hear the sea before you see it. We learned to read the sky properly, to notice when the fishermen started packing up, to treat afternoon storms as invitation rather than interruption.

The farmhouse door frame caught my forehead twice more before I learned to duck. The cockerel never adjusted his schedule to suit ours. But somewhere between the planned hikes and the adapted ones, between ambition and acceptance, I found something I'd not expected from a walking holiday: the particular pleasure of letting a place teach you its own pace, rather than imposing yours upon it.