In those heady early days of infatuation, romance can be found wherever you go. Love is blind to candle­wick bedspreads, rude waiters and stale cigarette smoke. Indeed, in Paris these are essential ingredients for your first weekend break together.

It’s almost ironic that the honeymoon should be your ultimate romantic blow-out, at a stage when you would be happy almost anywhere. “Bed of nails,” my husband used to say – referring not, I hope, to our relationship, but to the fact that we cared not a jot where we slept on our carefree, spontaneous travels.

But the years pass, things change. People get pickier and more accustomed to ensuite bathrooms and clean (if not 300-thread count) sheets. And, let’s face it, some destinations are ­distinctly more conducive to amorousness than others. 

Compare, for example, a road trip along the Amalfi Coast – the pastel-painted tumble of Positano, dinners of sea bream acqua pazza, and music in gardens of lemon trees strung with lanterns – to one through Serbia, and its dinners of sauerkraut and sour cheese, nights interrupted by allergies to horsehair pillows, impromptu trumpet playing and a ­permanently drunken B&B owner proffering shots of homemade rakija. It’s not hard to imagine which left us most enamoured.

As Valentine’s Day looms, it’s time to find out what we should we look for in a destination for that all-out romantic break. Are there certain key ingredients – great sweeping mountainscapes, dreamy desert islands, cities with heart-­stirring architecture, five-star hotels – guaranteed to melt even the hardest, most time-worn hearts? 

“Oh, I’m always partial to a beach – and soft sand would have to be preferable to ow-ow-ow pebbles,” says Jill Mansell, who, having sold 14 million romance novels, knows a thing or two about seductive settings. “Also, big, crashing waves are more exciting than namby-pamby rippling ones. Throw in an irresistible seaside village community and I’m in heaven.” No wonder, then, that she has set her latest book, Should I Tell You? (Headline, £14.99), in a Cornish seaside town.