I have never been so relieved to see a stone wall in all my life. After six hours of driving from Bologna airport, during which I managed to get us lost not once but twice, we finally crawled up the winding road to Fiumalbo and spotted the wooden sign for our holiday home. The sat nav had given up entirely somewhere near Pavullo nel Frignano, and my partner had developed that particular silent patience that speaks louder than words.

The mishap, though. I must tell you about the mishap. In my wisdom, I had decided to stop at a supermarket in Modena to stock up on provisions, feeling terribly organised and continental. I purchased what I believed to be a modest selection of cheeses, breads, and a bottle of something red and promising. What I had not noticed, in my flustered state, was that I had somehow acquired a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano roughly the size of a car tyre. The checkout woman had looked at me with something between pity and amusement. I now understood why. This cheese became our unwelcome passenger, rolling about in the boot, wedging itself under seats, generally making its presence known. By the time we arrived, I had developed a complicated relationship with dairy.

But then we opened the gate, and the cheese was forgotten. The house sat there in the afternoon light, all warm stone and wooden shutters, with a terrace that looked out over nothing but trees and sky and the distant suggestion of mountains. A cat appeared from nowhere, inspected us with evident disapproval, and disappeared into the rosemary. I decided this was a good omen. Cats know things.

The first morning, I woke to absolute silence. Not the silence of absence, but the silence of fullness, birds and breeze and somewhere a dog whose job was clearly to remind the valley that time still passed. I made coffee in the small kitchen, opened the doors to the terrace, and simply stopped. This was the revelation. I had brought books, three of them, ambitious books I had been meaning to read for years. I read perhaps four pages of the first one that entire week. The sunshine was too insistent, too generous. It fell across the wooden table in patterns that shifted and changed, and watching this became occupation enough.

We established a rhythm of magnificent laziness. Mornings on the terrace with that coffee and whatever bread had survived the cheese encounter. A slow walk down to the village, perhaps, to buy tomatoes that actually tasted of something, to nod at the elderly men who gathered in the piazza with the confidence of people who had never once consulted a weather app. Fiumalbo itself is small, medieval, all narrow passages and sudden views. I never learned the way through it properly, which became a point of pride. Getting slightly lost in a village of five hundred souls requires a special talent.

Some days we walked a little further, along paths through chestnut woods, finding streams that ran cold and clear. We carried nothing but water and the expectation of returning. Once we found a spot where wild strawberries grew among the stones, and sat there for an hour, picking and eating, discussing nothing of consequence. The cheese, meanwhile, remained in the fridge, gradually diminishing, a monument to my hubris.

I had intended to be productive, to plan, to perhaps write postcards. I wrote none. The sunshine and the slowness worked on me like something medicinal. I realised, somewhere around day four, that I had been living as if relaxation were something to be achieved, another item for the list. Here it was simply the medium, the air one breathed. I felt almost embarrassed by this revelation, as if I had been caught out in some obvious truth that everyone else had long understood.

The evenings brought their own reward. We cooked simply, badly sometimes, with that enormous cheese grated over everything until it became a family joke. We ate outside until the mosquitoes claimed their territory, then retreated with our wine to watch the darkness settle over the valley. No television, no news, no sense of what day it was beyond the quality of light.

On our final morning, I sat on the terrace with my cold coffee, watching the mist lift from the hills. The cat returned, perhaps the same one, perhaps a different critic entirely. I felt no urge to capture the moment, to photograph or describe it beyond the simple act of noticing. This, I thought, is what I had come for. Not the cheese, certainly. Not even the walks or the village or the medieval charm. Just this: permission to be still, to let the sunshine do its work, to discover that doing very little, done properly, is doing quite enough indeed.