I have never been very good at reading maps, which is a polite way of saying I am absolutely hopeless at them. So when my partner handed me the directions to our Montecorice holiday let in Campania and suggested I navigate, I should have known we were in for an adventure. The sat nav had given up somewhere near Salerno, probably exhausted by my refusal to follow its instructions, and there I was squinting at a crumpled printout while we wound our way up roads that grew narrower with every turn.

The mishap came at a junction where I confidently announced we needed to go left. We went left. Twenty minutes later, after descending through olive groves that grew increasingly wild and passing a farmer who looked at us with the kind of pity usually reserved for lost pets, we realised we were heading towards the sea rather than away from it. I had sent us in entirely the wrong direction. My partner, to their eternal credit, only sighed and turned the car around without a single I told you so. We found the place eventually, tucked into the hillside with views that made my navigational incompetence almost worth it.

It was late September when we arrived, that golden stretch of the year that Italians seem to treat as a well-kept secret. The summer crowds had thinned to almost nothing, which meant the drive back from our wrong turn had been almost eerily quiet, just the occasional scooter buzzing past with a basket of grapes or tomatoes strapped to the back. The heat had softened too, no longer the aggressive, walloping sort of August warmth that sends everyone indoors for the afternoon, but something gentler and more forgiving. You could still sit outside at midday without feeling faint, which was just as well since the terrace at the property was clearly where the owners expected you to spend your time.

The first thing that struck me was how the season had shaped everything about the place. The garden was in that productive, slightly chaotic phase of late harvest. Tomato vines sagged under fruit that was splitting from too much sun then rain then sun again. Fig trees dropped their bounty onto the ground below, and you could smell them fermenting slightly in the warmth, that sweet, boozy scent that makes wasps go slightly mad. The owners had left us a bowl of just-picked plums on the kitchen table, still warm from the branch, and a note explaining that the neighbour would be by with fresh eggs in the morning because his hens were laying more than his family could manage.

Inside, the house had that particular quality of Italian country properties where everything feels slightly provisional in the nicest possible way. The shutters were thrown wide to catch any breeze, and the afternoon light came through in thick, honey-coloured slabs. There was no air conditioning, which in high summer might have been a trial, but in late September felt like a deliberate choice, a way of living with the season rather than fighting against it. I found myself moving more slowly, matching my pace to the warmth, doing what the locals clearly did and saving any real activity for the cooler hours.

That first evening, we walked down to Montecorice itself, a proper working village where no one seemed particularly interested in tourists. The seasonal rhythm was everywhere. Older men sat outside the bar discussing the olive harvest that was coming, gesturing towards trees that were just beginning to show the faintest silvery hint of readiness. A woman was stringing up peppers to dry in her window, the traditional preparation for winter sauces. We ate at a small place where the menu had already shifted from the grilled fish of high summer to heartier pasta with wild mushrooms, the first of the season, the owner explained with some pride, gathered that morning from the hills behind Acciaroli.

I went to bed that night with the windows open and the sound of crickets still going strong, though I knew they would not last much longer. There was already a chill gathering in the early hours, just enough to make you reach for a blanket. It struck me then how much of travel is about timing, about catching a place in its particular moment. A month earlier and we would have found a different Italy, faster and more crowded and more expensive. A month later and the garden would have been stripped bare, the terrace too cold for morning coffee, the crickets silenced. We had arrived in that perfect in-between, and even my disastrous navigation could not spoil it. Some wrong turns, it turns out, simply take a little longer to reach the right place.