I'd left the M6 at the crack of dawn, endured Stansted's finest £7 sandwich, and flown into Trieste feeling rather pleased with myself. Two hours later, I was hopelessly lost down a lane that my hire car's sat nav clearly considered more of a theoretical concept than an actual road. The vines were heavy with September grapes, golden in the late afternoon, and I was too busy admiring them to notice the tiny sign for Premariacco half-hidden behind a fig tree. I reversed into a ditch. A very small ditch, admittedly, but enough to require a friendly tractor driver called Gianni to haul me out with a rope and a great deal of amused Italian that needed no translation.

That was my arrival. Not quite the rustic elegance I'd imagined, but very much the autumnal reality of Friuli.

The property itself sat at the end of a gravel track, surrounded by vineyards that seemed to glow in the fading light. It was an old stone farmhouse, the sort that looks like it has been there since before anyone thought to write things down, with wooden shutters that had weathered to a soft silver-grey. The key was under a terracotta pot, which felt thrillingly illicit, and I let myself into a kitchen that smelled of dried lavender and old woodsmoke. Someone had left a bottle of Friulano and a bowl of late-season plums from the garden. I ate three standing at the stone sink, watching the mist begin to rise from the fields.

September in Friuli is harvest time, and the whole region seemed to be holding its breath in that particular way that precedes intense activity. The next morning I woke to the sound of mechanical harvesters in the distance, a rhythmic drone that replaced any need for an alarm clock. I made coffee in a battered moka pot and sat on the terrace wrapped in a blanket, because autumn mornings here carry a sharpness that summer visitors never quite believe. The vines below the house were still laden, the leaves beginning to turn at their edges, that particular yellow-green that signals the season's turn.

I had planned to drive somewhere, do something, tick off the usual recommendations. Instead I walked down to the village, drawn by the smell of woodsmoke and baking bread. The local bakery was doing a brisk trade in apple strudel, another seasonal migrant from just over the border. I ate a slice on a bench outside the church, watching an old man in overalls carefully tie up his tomato plants against the first hints of colder weather. Everything felt provisional, transitional, the last warmth being gathered in before the proper cold arrived.

Back at the house, I spent the afternoon doing very little of any use. There was a hammock strung between two walnut trees, and I lay in it reading the same paragraph repeatedly while watching clouds move across the valley. The walnuts were beginning to drop, I noticed, small thuds in the grass that made me jump at first. I gathered a pocketful, feeling faintly ridiculous, and later spent twenty minutes failing to crack them with a door handle before finding the proper tool in a kitchen drawer.

Evenings came quickly. By half past six the light had gone soft and golden, then suddenly not golden at all, and I found myself lighting candles and building fires with the confidence of someone who absolutely did not grow up with a fireplace. The first attempt smoked spectacularly, setting off a detector I hadn't known existed and requiring windows to be thrown open to the now-chilly air. I stood there in my jumper, waving smoke with a tea towel, and laughed at the absurdity of it all.

That was the shape of those first days. Not the polished travel experience I'd somehow expected, but something messier and more particular. The season demanded a different rhythm, slower mornings, earlier nights, an attention to small comforts. I found myself noticing things I would have walked straight past in summer's full glare: the particular quality of light through turning leaves, the way mist pooled in the valley each dawn, the smell of woodsmoke from neighbouring chimneys marking the hours.

On my fourth morning, Gianni passed by on his tractor and waved. I waved back, standing in dew-wet grass with my coffee, and felt something shift from embarrassment to something like belonging. Not quite belonging, perhaps. But the beginning of understanding how a place works, what it asks of you, what it offers in return.

The grapes were all harvested by the time I left, the vines stripped to their architectural bones against a sharper sky. I drove away more carefully than I'd arrived, pausing properly at that tiny sign behind the fig tree. The ditch was still there, a small scar in the verge. I didn't reverse into it this time, which felt like progress of a sort.