I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my life, and I have never wanted to throw one out of a moving vehicle quite so much either. The journey to our Sulmona holiday let had begun with the sort of naive optimism that only a British tourist in April can muster. We had flown into Rome, picked up a car that was slightly less powerful than a hairdryer, and set off eastward with dreams of mountain air and proper pasta. What we had not accounted for was the peculiar talent Italian roads have for looking straightforward on a map and turning into something resembling a goat track the moment you commit to them.

The mishap came just outside Sulmona itself. A junction that appeared on our screen as a gentle curve turned out to be a sharp left that climbed at roughly the angle of a staircase. The little car wheezed. I panicked. We ended up in someone's olive grove, nose-first among trees that had probably been there since before my grandmother was born. A man in a flat cap appeared from nowhere, looking less surprised than I would have liked. He waved us back with the resigned patience of someone who had seen this many times before. We reversed in stages, each accompanied by my partner making noises like a disappointed librarian.

By the time we found the actual property, perched on a hillside with views that made me temporarily forget my embarrassment, the April afternoon had turned to that particular golden hour that seems to last longer in Abruzzo than anywhere else I have been. The air was still sharp enough to need a jumper, but the sun carried a weight to it, a promise of the warmth that would come. This was the in-between time, and it shaped everything about those first few hours.

The owner had left the heating on low, which I initially thought excessive until the sun dropped properly and the mountain chill set in. April in Abruzzo is not to be trusted. We opened every window to let in the view, then closed them again within twenty minutes, laughing at ourselves. The terrace, which would obviously be the star of the stay come summer, demanded a blanket and a cup of tea that evening. We sat there anyway, watching the light change over the Maiella mountains, feeling smug and slightly frozen.

The kitchen smelled of wood and something herbal I could not identify. Later I realised it was probably just the surrounding scrubland finding its way through cracks older than our house back home. We had planned to cook properly that first night, having read about the local saffron and the famous confetti sweets. Instead we made cheese on toast and drank wine out of mugs because we could not work the fancy corkscrew. The seasonal produce would have to wait for markets that opened properly with the warmer weeks.

What struck me most, once the embarrassment of the olive grove incident faded, was how the time of year made everything feel provisional and precious. The pool sat covered, patient, waiting for swimmers who would not arrive for another month at least. The garden held that particular tension of early spring, things poking through soil but not committing fully. Even the town below us, Sulmona proper, had a quietness that I suspected would vanish by June. We had the place at a moment of held breath, and there was something quietly wonderful in that.

I woke early the next morning to birdsong and cold feet, pulled on two pairs of socks, and made coffee while watching mist clear from the valley. The heating clicked on automatically. Somewhere in the planning, I had imagined myself in linen, drinking espresso in Mediterranean sunshine. Reality had handed me thermals and a borrowed fleece, and I found I did not mind at all. There is a particular honesty to experiencing a place when it is not trying to be its best self for tourists.

We did make it to the market eventually, and we did learn to work the corkscrew. But those first impressions, shaped so completely by an April that could not decide if it was winter's end or summer's beginning, stayed with me longer than the better-planned moments. The olive grove man had been right not to look surprised. People like me probably arrived in that state of seasonal confusion all the time, expecting one thing and finding another, learning slowly that Abruzzo in spring asks you to adapt rather than the other way round.

I would not have had it any other way, though I did check the junction carefully on the way home.