I have never been so relieved to see a pothole in my life. After twelve hours of driving from the Eurotunnel, three wrong turns round Venice, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted "Tolmezzo" was a seafood restaurant, we finally rattled over a cattle grid and into what I prayed was the right driveway. The pothole meant we were definitely in rural Italy. Civilisation does not bother with potholes.

The mishap came thirty seconds later. I flung open the car door with theatrical exhaustion, ready to stretch my legs and perhaps weep gently, and promptly knocked over a terracotta pot that had been minding its own business since approximately 1987. The soil stayed in the pot. The geranium did not. It sailed through the air in slow motion, like a green firework, and landed in a lavender bush with a soft thump. My partner looked at me. I looked at the geranium. The geranium, I felt, looked at me with the resigned disappointment of something that had seen this before.

"Buongiorno," called a voice from above, and I looked up to find a woman on a balcony who had evidently witnessed the entire horticultural assault. She smiled, which I took as either extraordinary kindness or the knowledge that my security deposit was already forfeit.

The house itself rose up from the hillside in that particular way stone buildings do in Friuli, as if they have grown there rather than been built. Creamy walls, wooden shutters in that faded green that makes British paint manufacturers weep with envy, and a terrace that seemed to float above the valley. I had expected charm. I had not expected to feel immediately scolded by the view, which stretched across wooded hills towards mountains I later learned were the Carnic Prealps, and which seemed to ask why I had ever bothered with anywhere else.

Inside, the floors were tiled in something cool and terracotta-coloured that made my tired feet sing. The kitchen smelled faintly of woodsmoke and dried herbs, and someone had left a bottle of local wine on the counter with a note I could not read but absolutely trusted. There was a fireplace large enough to park a bicycle in. I did not park a bicycle in it, though the temptation flickered.

I unpacked badly, as is my custom, leaving a trail of socks and anxiety from doorway to bedroom. The bed had a wrought-iron frame that creaked with historical significance. Every window framed something green and implausible. I kept opening them to check it was real, then closing them because the mosquitoes had also received my itinerary.

By evening I was sitting on that floating terrace with the assaulted wine, watching the light change over Tolmezzo below. The town clustered round its medieval tower looking pleased with itself, which I thought fair enough. Somewhere a dog barked with the relaxed rhythm of something that had never heard of a deadline. My partner pointed out that I had been smiling for twenty minutes without speaking, which for me constitutes a medical event.

I thought about the geranium, now rescued and repotted with soil from the same lavender bush that had cushioned its fall. I thought about the drive, the sat nav, the argument at the Venice roundabout that had made a lorry driver actually laugh at me. None of it mattered. The air smelled of pine and something cooking with garlic, and my feet were still singing against those tiles, and I had never been so grateful for a pothole in my life.