I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through a vineyard. There we were, twelve hours after leaving Gatwick, bleary-eyed and slightly hysterical, crawling along a dirt track between rows of grapevines in our hire car. My partner was muttering something about "romantic rural idylls" whilst I clutched the door handle, convinced we were about to become a very English statistic in Italian agricultural insurance. Turns out the proper turnoff had been three hundred metres back, helpfully obscured by a hedge and what I can only describe as aggressive foliage.

The actual approach to Albarella is far more civilised, though by that point my standards had plummeted. A proper road! Signage! A small bridge over one of those narrow waterways that criss-cross this corner of Veneto like veins on a leaf. We were staying on Isola Albarella, a private island in the southern part of the Venetian lagoon, connected to the mainland by that slender causeway. The place has the feel of a well-kept secret, the sort of holiday spot Italians have been quietly enjoying whilst the rest of us pile into Venice proper.

Our villa sat in a quiet residential pocket, one of those neat terraced numbers with a private garden and patio that the website had promised. The key collection involved a small office near the island's entrance, where a woman named Carla handed over our envelope with the efficiency of someone who had done this ten thousand times before. She also, bless her, pointed out the supermarket location twice, presumably sensing our desperation. We had arrived on a Saturday evening in late September, that golden window when the summer crowds have thinned but the weather still clings to warmth like a guest who doesn't know the party's ended.

The mishap, when it came, was entirely my fault. In my eagerness to investigate the garden, I walked straight into the patio door that I had assumed was open. The glass was spotless, the collision spectacular, and the resulting nose-print remained there for the entire fortnight as a monument to my own stupidity. My partner laughed for approximately six minutes, then made me a gin and tonic from the emergency supplies we'd picked up at Marco Polo airport. We sat on those plastic patio chairs as the light faded, watching dragonflies the size of small helicopters dart between the hedges, and I nursed both my dignity and my slightly bruised forehead.

That first evening set the tone more than I realised at the time. Albarella doesn't shout for attention. The island hums with a particular rhythm: early morning cyclists on the flat paths, the distant clatter of boats at the marina, the occasional golf cart puttering past with shopping bags. Our villa was simple, clean, thoroughly unpretentious. The kitchen had that particular Italian knack of being compact yet somehow containing everything required to produce a decent meal. We made pasta with tomatoes and mozzarella that first night, ingredients from the island's small supermarket that tasted of actual sunlight, and ate outside with cheap wine and the satisfaction of having finally, properly arrived.

I kept checking the patio door after that.