It was the most unexpected sound and the last thing I had imagined I might hear in this bastion of western civilisation. Rising through the silence of the medieval room, the Muslim call to prayer rang out, instantly transporting me back to my childhood, to Iran. To days punctuated by the call that rose up over rooftops, drifted across the school playground, washed over us as we played and skipped and studied. It was so familiar and yet such a surprise that it tore clean through me, wrenching at my heart.

I was in a room in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s town hall, attending a meditation session my neighbour had invited me to. I’d been in Florence for just one month, arriving with nothing but a suitcase, a book proposal and the address of a friend’s flat. For the first time in my adult life, I had no job, no salary and no flat of my own. Burnt out by my high-octane job and depressed, unanchored from friends and family, I felt like a piece of flotsam washed up in the Renaissance gutters.

This was not the first time I had arrived in an unknown city in this state of unmoored confusion. The last time had been in 1979, when we had fled the revolution in Iran for the safe shores of Britain. I had been nine then, and the terror that accompanied us as we stood in front of the immigration officer at Heathrow still echoed through me every time I crossed a border. That refugee child, wide-eyed, confused, scared and ashamed, was still somewhere inside me. I was now a symbol of modern Britain: an exile who had been brought up, educated and polished in the UK, my accent cut-glass with no trace of the Iranian tones that had caused curious, sometimes hostile looks and which had mortified me, made me feel like an outsider.

All these feelings had been tucked away neatly inside me. I was barely aware of their presence until that dark February night when the sound of the call to prayer echoed through the Palazzo Vecchio and pierced through the many layers of protection that guarded them. I hung my head and let the tears flow.

Afterwards, I walked home with my neighbour. A tall, quiet man, Giuseppe was an artist. He had knocked on my door earlier that cold night and suggested I attend the meditation session with him. We paused to take in the view of the Ponte Vecchio. There was a sliver of crescent moon hanging large and luminous over the bridge. “Ah,” said Giuseppe with an expansive gesture. “This is your moon, no, Kamin?” Having said nothing about the tears he must have seen me shed at the meeting, this was his way of offering me peace, I realised. The crescent moon of Islam hung like a scimitar over one of the greatest works of western architecture and, in that moment, I felt my own two sides meet and settle together, for the first time since 1979, happily coexisting.

This was the moment that convinced me to stay on. That night clarified everything. Here in Florence, I felt at home. Without any contacts or any common language, I had nevertheless found myself making friends at every turn, so sociable were the Italians on my street. Within days I knew the names of my neighbours and most of the shopkeepers and baristas on the street, something that in four years in London had eluded me. As the weeks wore on, my British reserve melted and I, too, stopped to chat (mostly with gestures and shrugs) on the street corner. It reminded me of how, in the year of demonstrations and unrest which led to Iran’s revolution, we children would gather on street corners to swap whatever garbled news we had managed to glean from our parents’ hushed conversations. In spite of what the revolution later became, I remember those news-swapping sessions with excitement, a feeling of being in the thick of things. Here, too, every time Giuseppe reported to me, with perfect solemnity, news from the street, I felt involved again. It was not the same as when, as a magazine editor, I had known the latest unprintable celebrity gossip or world news before they broke. This was small, local, human involvement. Within a month, I felt woven into the fabric of my street, a part of the tableau of artists, bakers, greengrocers, barmen and plumbers. I was The Writer, the one with her laptop always open on the café table.

The visits to my local fruit and veg market were another revelation. There, I had discovered a symphony of colour, noise and chaos which had pierced through my melancholy. After the monochrome tones of my life in London, I felt like I had landed in a Technicolor movie set. I drank in the colours, the smells, the loud chatter as stall holders bantered in sing-song Italian. The food was local and I was instantly converted to the sensual pleasure in the feel, look and smell of the fresh produce. In the rush of my London life, I had eaten ready-made “health” foods at my desk, individual portions laid out in polystyrene coffins, shrouded in plastic.

I was again sped back in time to Iran, to accompanying my mother to the market, the excitement of finding fresh pistachios in September, of spotting the summer’s first strawberries. How we had sat in my grandmother’s courtyard by the shallow pool of water which relieved the day’s heat and helped her and my aunts clean mountains of herbs. Leaves of parsley, coriander, dill, chives and mint were plucked from their stalks and thrown into a large colander as we joined in the women’s chat. They’d cut small Persian cucumbers along their length and, sprinkling each half with salt, gave them to us to crunch through as snacks. The ripe tomatoes we bit through like apples, again with just a few sprinkles of salt on their soft flesh to bring out the sweetness. The first time I brought home a Florentine tomato from the market and sunshine exploded in my mouth after so many years, I fell back in love with the simple pleasure of eating sun-filled, delicious produce.

As I rediscovered the joy of slow eating and slow living, Florence’s familiarity drew into focus. The domes and slim towers decorating the skyline were like the domes of mosques with their accompanying minarets. The tiny back streets where the smell of sewage mingled with a puff of cologne left behind by a passing man reminded me of the koocheh pas koochehs [back alleys] of my hometown of Abadan, labyrinthine and sheltered from the sun by tall walls, holding the scent of our stylish Abadani men as they sauntered past.

The palazzos with their forbidding fortress-like exteriors harbouring inner gardens, courtyards and areas that were divided between men and women, were so much like the traditional Iranian houses which presented a plain protective face to the world and held their treasures – the women, the gardens, the fountains – close inside instead. I trailed behind tour guides who explained to their charges the classical influence on the architecture of Brunelleschi, but never once acknowledged what I saw everywhere: the influence of the Middle East and Islamic architecture. I dug deeper and discovered Brunelleschi’s famous dome had taken the honour of world’s largest free-standing dome from a 14th-century Ilkhanid mausoleum in Iran, boasting the same double dome structure and inside brickwork that Brunelleschi used. I was seduced by the idea that the mighty Italian architect had been familiar with my homeland’s wonders.

Italy, I came to quickly feel, had less in common with the northern Europe which had formed me, and more in common with the ancient land which had borne me. An instinctive understanding of the Italian character – with its warmth, drama and propensity to chaos and noise – resonated within me and I found it easy to make firm friends. I found myself slotting into Florentine life with its elaborate courtesies and politenesses so much like our own, and the love I had felt first for those Italian tomatoes soon encompassed the city, its people and, finally, my dual national, hyphenated Iranian-British self. My depression vanished, my sick body healed itself, and I finally found someone wonderful to love. I attribute this to the healing properties of the Mediterranean diet and the wonder elixir that is excellent Tuscan olive oil. But I suspect that the profound happiness that came from finally accepting both my western and eastern sides as they were fed and acknowledged by the city, was what really changed my life.

Bella Figura: How to Live, Love and Eat the Italian Way is published by Bloomsbury on 5 April at £12.99. To order a copy for £11.04, go to guardianbookshop.com