I have never been so relieved to see a stone wall in my life. After seven hours that included a delayed flight to Rome, a hire car with a sat nav that clearly fancied itself as a rally driver, and one spectacularly wrong turn up what I can only describe as a goat track, we finally spotted the gates of our Colonnella villa near the hilltop town of Colonnella itself. The thing is, I was so busy celebrating this minor triumph that I completely forgot about the large wheelie suitcase in the boot. One enthusiastic fling of the tailgate later, and my best pair of walking trousers were making a bid for freedom, rolling straight down the gravel drive like they had somewhere better to be. My partner just stood there with the key in one hand and a bottle of warm Fanta in the other, watching my clothes make their escape towards a very confused-looking olive tree.

The villa sat perched on the hillside with views that instantly made the chaos feel worthwhile. Terracotta roof tiles, cream walls that had gone properly golden in the afternoon sun, and enough climbing jasmine to scent the entire postcode. I abandoned my suitcase retrieval mission for approximately thirty seconds just to stand there gawping at the Adriatic glimmering in the distance, which my partner helpfully pointed out was probably how my trousers had got such a head start. Fair enough.

Getting inside proved to be its own small adventure. The key turned smoothly enough, but the front door had clearly settled into its frame sometime in the previous century and now required a shoulder technique that I have definitely not mastered. After what felt like an audition for a police drama, it finally gave way with a groan that suggested we had woken something structural. We stumbled into a cool tiled hallway that smelled faintly of lemons and old stone, and I immediately forgot about my bruised dignity.

The kitchen was the first room that properly stopped me. Not because it was grand or modern - it absolutely was not - but because someone had left a proper ceramic jug of fresh water on the wooden table, and through the open shutters I could hear nothing but cicadas and the distant clank of someone else's lunch preparations. There was a fireplace that looked like it had seen several generations of family arguments and reconciliations, and shelves lined with actual cookbooks in Italian that I knew I would spend the week pretending I could follow. The fridge hummed contentedly in the corner, and I found myself already planning the first trip to the local shop for pecorino and whatever vegetables looked back at me with enough personality.

The garden was where I properly lost any remaining sense of travel stress. A covered terrace with a table clearly designed for long lunches, a barbecue that had seen some action, and a pool that caught the light in that particular way that makes you want to abandon all plans forever. I finally retrieved my wandering trousers from their olive tree refuge, shook out the dust, and realised with a small jolt that I was already thinking about dinner before we had even unpacked the car. This is not like me. I am normally the person with a spreadsheet, a backup plan, and a carefully curated list of cultural obligations. Something about this place, about the way the afternoon light fell across those worn stone walls, had already started dissolving all of that.

My partner emerged from exploring upstairs with the news that our bedroom had shutters that actually worked and a view that would definitely make morning coffee something approaching a religious experience. I nodded along, but I was mostly listening to the absolute nothing of the countryside, broken only by a dog barking somewhere down the valley and what I later learned was the afternoon church bell from Colonnella itself. The mishaps of the journey already felt like they had happened to someone else, some more frantic version of myself who had not yet learned that a suitcase rolling down a drive is really just Abruzzo's way of saying welcome, slow down, you are not in charge here.

By the time we actually brought the bags in properly, the sun had shifted and the jasmine had intensified and I had already decided that the sat nav's earlier attempt to murder us via unmarked track was probably the best wrong turn we had ever taken.