I have never been one to read a map properly, and my first attempt at reaching our Loiano villa in Emilia Romagna proved this beyond doubt. It was late October, and the autumn light was already beginning to fade as we left Bologna airport in our hire car. The sat nav had other ideas about which road to take, and I, being stubborn and slightly overconfident after a mediocre airport coffee, decided I knew better. Twenty minutes later we found ourselves on a narrow lane between two fields of harvested maize, surrounded by nothing but the smell of damp earth and my own mounting panic. My partner sat in silence, which was somehow worse than shouting.

We eventually found the right road, climbing slowly into the Apennine foothills where the trees had turned proper shades of copper and gold. The villa sat on a gentle slope looking east, and as we pulled up in the gravel drive, the last of the afternoon sun was catching the stone walls and making everything glow like a painting. It was that particular quality of October light, thin and honeyed, that makes ordinary things look briefly magical. I stood there with my ridiculous oversized suitcase and felt the first proper breath of the place. Cool, slightly smoky, carrying the faint sweetness of rotting apples from somewhere nearby.

The owner had left the key under a terracotta pot, classic stuff, and inside the villa smelled of closed rooms and old wood. October had clearly been creeping in through every gap. I went straight to the shutters and threw them open, and there was the valley falling away below us, mist already pooling in the lower fields where the temperature had dropped faster than up here. The pool, which had doubtless been glorious in August, was now covered with a tarpaulin straining with collected rainwater and a scattering of yellow leaves. We would not be swimming. I felt a small, silly pang about this, though I am not much of a swimmer and the water would have been bitter.

That first evening, we drove the five minutes into Loiano village proper, which took longer than it should because I kept stopping to look at the light on the hills. The village was quiet in that seasonal way, the summer visitors gone, the locals getting on with autumn business. We found a small trattoria where they were already serving ribollita, that thick Tuscan-influenced soup which appears when the weather turns. I ate two bowls and felt smug about my jumper choice.

Back at the villa, the temperature had dropped properly. The heating system made a noise like a disapproving relative, but it worked. I sat with a glass of Sangiovese from a local vineyard, watching the darkness settle completely over the valley, and felt that particular contentment that comes from being slightly cold outside and properly warm within. The October stars were sharp and numerous, the summer haze long gone.

I thought about my navigation failure and how it had cost us an hour, yet delivered us to this villa at exactly the moment when the light was doing its brief, perfect thing. Sometimes being stubborn and wrong works out. I would not learn from this, of course. The morning would bring fog, I knew, and the slow revelation of hills as the sun burned through. That is October in these parts. You do not get everything at once. You wait, and it gives itself to you gradually, which is perhaps a lesson in something, though I was too tired and too full of soup to work out what.