There’s always the worry that you build a place up in your head to be some vision of paradise before you even get there, leading to inevitable disappointment. While my romanticising of New York is well known and much discussed in these (web) pages, my romanticising of Italy – although less obvious – is older still. I wonder if it hurt my mother as we grew, given that we are more Irish than Italian, but you mythologise the more exotic parts of yourself, don’t you? Or at least I did, even though the descendants of Italian immigrants are not themselves uncommon in the west of Scotland; alongside some sort of perverse solidarity for the pastas my Scottish homeland found as hard to spell as my surname.

When I got off the plane at Naples my mum turned to me and smiled, and I felt as if I wanted to kiss the tarmac like the Pope (a not inappropriate comparison, as you could probably purchase a different papal souvenir every day in Campania including, on one market stall, a pillow emblazoned with his face and arms raised in supplication). Now I’d barely slept, courtesy of the easyJet special from Embra at 6:45am and previous 4am bus from a Buchanan Bus Station resembling a post-apocalyptic wasteland full of shuffling T in the Park zombies, but that seemed like a massive overreaction. Especially given that I later dozed through most of the bus journey through the mountains and some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet, blinking my eyes open in Meta to thrill at the sight of trees laden with ripe oranges.

Here are the things I love about Italy: the food; the views; the breathtaking beauty of the volcanic slopes surrounding us; how natural it feels to me to push through dawdling crowds on the Corsa Italia just as the natives do. The things I hate? The heat, of course; the number of stray cats and dogs with hungry eyes that you see everywhere (the former at the harbour, the latter skulking and sleeping all over Pompeii) – and the fact that, even here, nobody can spell my name. It’s EFF. EE. ARR. ELL. AY. NO, AY. FOR APP… ER, ARANCIA.

With my pale legs and awkwardness in a swimsuit, the Italians immediately know that I am not one of them but my red lipstick continues to be enough to fool my fellow Scots until I open my mother. My accent always gets a little harsher abroad and I suspect I play on it a little, although I also enjoy playing with those languages that allow for enunciated vowels and rolled “r”s like mine.

In Sorrento we stay at the Grand Hotel Capodimonte, an immaculately preserved hotel built into the mountains with 19th century marble fittings and excellent wifi. The staff are incredibly friendly, there are freshly-made omelettes for breakfast, the gin costs a fortune and – much like Glasgow buses – it takes you three lifts to get from any one part of the hotel to the other unless one of those parts is the reception. The elegant fittings do not diminish my Sophia Loren fantasies any, especially in the new dress I got with Sarah’s birthday vouchers; but the eleven euro bill when I treat my mum to a coffee and a plate of biscuits in the poolside ristorante makes me squawk like the typical Scot abroad.

Once I establish how to spell my name with the woman who sells tickets for the walking tour we take the train to Pompeii and walk around the ruins with Nancy, our guide, and a gaggle of American gap year kids who gawp at the plaster casts of corpses and, giggling, demand a trip to the brothel where ancient mosaics display a “menu” of erotic options like a pervy McDonalds (Nancy’s words, not mine; but I wish I had worn my Angry Feminist necklace despite the risks to the chain from sunscreen as the kids yelled jokes about Happy Meals to each other in between comparing plans for summer, and their futures. “I haven’t bought anywhere yet,” says this guy, not more than 21, with a job lined up in commercial real estate, “but it will be in Manhattan, near my office”. I am torn between screaming – this being the day that it emerges that the Scottish Help to Buy scheme has run out of money – and laughing at the fact that the name of his preferred upmarket suburb sounds like Maryhill). Pompeii itself is grandiose and surprisingly emotional: an 170 acre slice of history, frozen at the point it was buried by volcanic ash. We don’t make it to the Garden of the Fugitives but the plaster casts of bodies that we do see, curled up with their hands to their faces, make my breath catch in my throat. Incidentally, none of them looked like Peter Capaldi.

I could retire here, I think, soundtracked by Frank Turner’s “Live Fast, Die Old”; staying up all night while it’s cooler drinking limoncello with the windows open and the music at a just about socially acceptable volume. I’d wear yellow dresses and dye my hair back to its natural dark brown, paint my nails and try ever flavour in the gelaterias.