I had been living in the Middle East for more than a year by the time I finally travelled anywhere else in the region. A friend invited me to stay with her in the hills outside Beirut.

For me, Lebanon had always been a place of war; war-torn Beirut, conflict and hostages were words I associated with the place until I went there.

I had also heard it called the ‘Paris of the Middle East’, but I was dubious: it seemed an incongruous mix. It was where John McCarthy was taken hostage for five years. If I were taken, would I have as many friends? I was unsure of what to expect, but like most places of conflict, I thought it would be very different to anywhere I was used to.

When my Lebanese friend Ghada drove us from the airport through the city and to the mountains where her parents house is I was struck by how familiar Lebanon felt to me. It did not feel like the place I had heard about that held innocent journalists hostage and an estimated 250,000 civilians were killed during years of civil war.

As we drove through the centre of Beirut my six-year-old son pointed out the bullet holes. I had told him there were bullet holes in Beirut and was fascinated by the whole concept.

I have to admit I was as well. Here were buildings that would not look out of place on the Boulevards of Paris or the streets of London riddled with gunshot wounds. I couldn’t imagine a war in a place that looked so much like home. War happens in far-away places I will never see that are populated with people I would never meet.

Just as we left Beirut I saw a mosque and a church practically next door to each other. A reminder that however much like Europe it felt we were in the Middle East.

But as we drove up into the hills the feeling of being somewhere very familiar returned. The landscape was just like Italy; even the architecture was reminiscent, if ugly in places. It reminded me of southern Italy, a place I visited as a teenager when I met my Italian father for the first time.

My parents were divorced when I was two and there had been no contact between them until I was 14. Then my father took me on a grand tour of Italy; Venice, Rome, Florence and Naples. It is a journey I recently repeated when I was writing my book Ciao Bella – Sex, Dante and How to Find your Father in Italy.

But there are Starbucks in Italy. It is hard to imagine people shooting at each other at Starbucks.

I asked my friend Ghada why the war started.

“No one really knows,” she says. “There is so much hatred and anger. People blame it on different things. We even fight about the reasons we started fighting in the first place.”

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