My summer holiday was, quite literally, going swimmingly in Sweden. I was prepared to tell you about the joys of island life, such as taking the boat to a small nearby island to buy groceries at a tiny store, having smoked herring cook-outs at the neighbours’ house, enjoying sunny mornings where you wash in the sea with special Baltic-friendly soap.

But then, 48 hours into the holiday, a menacing low pressure system chugged across the middle stretch of Sweden and decided it would settle there for a few days. In one day the temperature shifted from the high 20s to the mid-teens, the clouds settled just above shoulder height and the rain started to fall.

For about the first two hours I made the usual excuses about the chilly temperatures and pelting rain (“Things needed to cool down”; “It’s good for the plants and trees.”; “It clears the air”) but soon lost patience. My friends Martin and Caroline had arrived with their son Nils for a couple of days of archipelago life, which should have featured trips along the snaking road of Högmarsö island, kayaking and lunches to be enjoyed on the dock under a big Nordic sky. Instead we were bundled up indoors, had exhausted the magazine supply far too quickly and none of us seemed overly thrilled with our summer book selection. While I think Martin and Caroline were OK with the weather because they were enjoying a luxurious combo of maternity leave mixed with six weeks of summer holidays, I decided that I wanted something a little warmer than 14°C for my summer holiday and started covertly texting and e-mailing friends and contacts in Europe’s southern extremities.

As this was still early-ish July, I was confident it wouldn’t be too much trouble finding a room for five days at a favourite hotel but I soon learnt that for many European hoteliers there was no recession. The Portixol in Palma had a room for one night but then I’d have to go on a waiting list for the next five. The Pellicano in Porto Ercole, Italy, was fully booked and even a somewhat desperate appeal to the daughter of the owner did little to shake a villa free. Moving further south, the San Pietro in Positano was also packed and, jumping to the extreme end of the Med, the Albergo in Beirut was crammed full in July.

For a moment I toyed with going back to London and then thought it might be nice to work out of our Zurich office and take advantage of the river and lake for lunchtime swims. With one eye on the thickening clouds above the roofline and another on a weather website, I had lost hope that there was going to be a magical change in the climate, which would mean I could be back in my trunks jumping off the jetty. At the moment I was about to pitch myself off the jetty anyway in the driving wind and rain, my SOS was picked up by my friend Olivia in Rome.

Springing into action she sent out an alert across her global hospitality network and within minutes she had co-ordinated a complex rescue operation that left little time for decisions and required immediate evacuation. She messaged me to say: “I have rooms, I have a boat, I’ve booked tables in great restaurants. All you need to do is get off that f***ing island.”

Less than 24 hours later, our aircraft touched down at Naples airport, a warm blast of air greeted us as the aircraft door whooshed open and moments later we were weaving through the traffic bound for Amalfi. After 75 minutes of hairpin turns and stunning vistas along the coast, we pulled up at the Hotel Santa Caterina and in an instant the summer holiday had been fully restored. The owner had managed to find a recently opened suite rather than just a room (I can highly recommend number 47), the Med was twinkling and refreshing, the air was filled with the scent of rosemary, cypress and lemon and the locally produced white was perfectly chilled.

I could have been quite happy parked on a lounger at the Santa Caterina for a full four days but the Hotel San Pietro up the coast lured me away (albeit temporarily) with its slinky Morgan 44 lobster boat. For a very brief moment I felt sorry for my tiny Zodiac, tethered to the dock in Sweden and bobbing in the chilly Baltic, but thoughts of murky northern Europe blew away as the skipper revved the engines and we carved through the sea towards Capri. Pulling into Capri’s main harbour, Olivia and a lovely friend from Cairo were waiting dockside and, before she had even thrown off her flip-flops, she was having the skipper chart a course that would take us to Sorrento, with its swimming coves, then back to the San Pietro for lunch.

Sweden will get a chance to redeem itself in August but if you find yourself in urgent need of a holiday fix, then Olivia’s Amalfi rescue remedy works miracles – all you need are perfect hosts and a very fast boat.

Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle magazine
tyler.brule@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/brule