I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock the wrong villa with someone else's key fob. There I was, standing outside a very confused family's terrace in Viareggio, jiggling a key that definitely did not belong to me, while their elderly nonna peered at me through the shutters with the sort of suspicion usually reserved for people trying to sell counterfeit handbags. I'd only popped to the local Coop for olive oil and somehow managed to collect the wrong set of keys from the lockbox. The property manager's voicemail, when I finally admitted defeat, was the most Italian thing imaginable: a ten-minute story about his cousin's wedding before he casually mentioned he'd be round in half an hour, "maybe forty minutes, who knows, traffic."

That forty minutes changed everything, because I met the neighbours properly. Not the family whose villa I'd attempted to burgle, though the nonna did eventually offer me a lemon from her tree through the fence, which I took as forgiveness. No, I mean the proper locals who materialised from nowhere the moment I looked slightly pathetic on the pavement.

First came Franco, who must have been seventy-five and was wearing a faded AC Milan shirt from approximately 1987. He was walking a dog the size of a loaf of bread that he referred to exclusively as "il Presidente." Franco spoke no English whatsoever and I speak restaurant-menu Italian at best, yet we managed a twenty-minute conversation about, I think, the best way to eat baccala and whether English people really do boil all their vegetables into submission. He kept patting my arm and saying "bravo, bravo" every time I constructed a sentence, which made me feel like a small child who'd successfully tied his own shoelaces. When the property manager finally arrived, Franco insisted on supervising the key handover as if it were a hostage exchange, barking instructions at both of us while il Presidente attempted to urinate on my suitcase.

The villa itself, when I finally got inside, was one of those lovely straightforward places with terracotta floors and shutters that actually function, not like the decorative nonsense you get in British new-builds. But I barely noticed the interiors because I'd been invited to aperitivo by the woman from the villa two doors down. Antonella taught English at the local liceo and had apparently been waiting years for a hapless foreigner to practise on. She arrived with a bottle of something local and her husband Marco, who repaired boats and had absolutely no interest in speaking English but enormous interest in explaining why Viareggio's carnival was superior to Venice's, using elaborate hand gestures and the occasional shouted Italian word that Antonella would then translate with visible embarrassment.

By nine o'clock that evening, I found myself at a plastic table on their terrace, eating pasta with clams that Marco had "just grabbed from the boat," while Antonella explained that she'd given up correcting her students' pronunciation of "beach" because the results were too traumatic for everyone involved. A teenager who turned out to be their son wandered through at one point, nodded at me with the weary acceptance of someone whose parents regularly adopt strangers, and disappeared with the entire bowl of cherries.

I went to bed that night with sand already in the sheets from a quick paddle I'd taken before dinner, slightly too much wine in my system, and the realisation that I'd spent precisely twenty minutes alone in a property I'd booked specifically for "peace and quiet." The wrong-key fiasco, which should have been the sort of minor disaster that ruins an arrival, had instead flung me into exactly the sort of chaotic, generous, slightly overwhelming local encounter that no amount of careful planning could have arranged. I lay there listening to Franco shouting at il Presidente somewhere in the distance and thought: this is going to be a very social holiday for someone who packed four novels and serious intentions.