I have never been so relieved to see a swimming pool in my life, and that includes the time I nearly stepped on a jellyfish in Cornwall.

The drive from Bologna airport had been going so well. My wife was navigating, the kids were miraculously quiet in the back, and I had even managed a bit of Italian on the hire car woman without her switching to English out of pity. Then Monzuno appeared on a hillside, all terracotta roofs and cypress trees, and I got cocky. Took the turn too fast, scraped the wheel on a stone wall, and spent ten minutes pretending I had definitely meant to stop there while a local man watched me from his balcony with the kind of patience that only comes from decades of watching British tourists do exactly this.

The property sat at the end of a gravel track that my wife described as "rustic" and I described as "a test of the suspension we did not pay for." But then we climbed out, and the smell hit us. Not petrol, not panic, but wild herbs and warm stone and something baking somewhere down the valley. The kids had already spotted the pool, shimmering there like a promise, and I will admit I felt my shoulders drop about three inches.

It was not fancy, this place. That was rather the point. A converted farmhouse sort of arrangement, thick walls that kept the heat out, shutters that actually worked, furniture that looked like it had been chosen by someone who understood that holidays involve red wine and the occasional spill. The kitchen opened straight onto a terrace with a long wooden table, and beyond that the hills rolled away in shades of green and gold that made you want to sit down and do absolutely nothing for several hours.

I did precisely that while my wife unpacked with the efficiency of someone who has accepted that I am fundamentally decorative in these situations. The kids were in the pool already, shrieking in that way that carries across valleys and probably annoyed several generations of Italian farmers. I did not care. I had a beer from the fridge, local apparently, and it tasted like the sort of thing that makes you reconsider your relationship with whatever lager you drink at home.

Dinner that night was simple. We had picked up bread and cheese and some cured meat from a shop in Monzuno village, barely ten minutes back down the road. The man had sliced the prosciutto with a seriousness I found quite moving, actually. We ate on the terrace as the light went soft and pink, the kids finally tired enough to sit still, my wife and I sharing a bottle of something red and regional that cost less than a London gin and tonic.

I kept touching the stone wall beside me, feeling its warmth. There is something about these old places, the way they have absorbed so many evenings like this one. Families before us, probably with their own hire car dramas and their own children shrieking in the pool. I thought about that scrape on the wheel and laughed, properly, for the first time in what felt like months. The local man had probably seen it all before. He was probably having his own dinner now, telling his wife about the English fool in the blue Renault.

We stayed up too late. The kids fell asleep on the outdoor sofa and we carried them in, one each, their warm heavy limbs familiar and precious. I stood on the terrace for a moment after, listening to nothing much, crickets maybe, a distant dog. The pool was dark now, just a faint gleam where the moon caught it.

I had come expecting a break from work, from routines, from the general noise of being a parent in a city. What I found was something simpler and better. A table outside, food that did not need to be complicated, time moving at a pace that allowed you to notice it. The scrape on the car would cost me, of course. But standing there, full of good bread and better wine, I decided it was probably the cheapest lesson in perspective I had ever bought.

The next morning I would explore properly, find the walking paths, maybe attempt a conversation in the village bar that would almost certainly end in charades. But for now, the hills were dark and the house was quiet and I had absolutely nowhere else I wanted to be.