I have never been particularly gifted at reading maps, which is how I found myself reversing a hire car down a narrow lane in Friuli while three elderly men watched from a doorway, taking it in turns to sip espresso and shake their heads. The satnav had given up on me somewhere near Udine, and my printed directions had turned into a damp origami swan courtesy of a spilled water bottle. I was looking for a holiday house near Tolmezzo, and I was approximately nowhere near it.

The mishap, if I am generous with myself, lasted forty minutes. I reversed past a vineyard, a crumbling stone wall, and what I later learned was someone's carefully tended vegetable patch. When I finally found the turning, it was so unmarked that I drove past it twice. The house sat at the end of a gravel track, half-hidden by acacia trees, with a terrace that caught the afternoon sun like it had been waiting specifically for me.

My first impression was not of grandeur but of relief. The key was where promised, under a terracotta pot that had seen better decades. I let myself in and stood in the cool of the kitchen, listening to nothing much at all. A fridge hummed. Somewhere distant, a dog barked once and apparently decided the matter was settled. I had arrived with plans, of course. I always arrive with plans. Hiking trails, nearby villages, a castle I had read about in a guidebook. But the terrace had two faded wooden chairs and a view of wooded hills that seemed to suggest, without saying anything rude, that my plans could wait.

I unpacked slowly, which is to say I removed a few items from my case and then sat on the edge of the bed for longer than necessary, watching dust motes move through a shaft of light. The house had that particular stillness of places that are not trying to impress anyone. The furniture was simple, the walls were thick, and the shutters creaked when I opened them. I found a hammock strung between two trees in the garden, its ropes frayed to that exact point where you wonder whether it is charming or reckless.

I chose to find it charming.

The following days settled into a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as rhythm. I would wake without an alarm, make coffee in a pot that required patience I did not naturally possess, and carry it to the terrace. The morning sun there was different from home, somehow more deliberate. I read the same page of my novel several times over, not from difficulty but from lack of urgency. There was nowhere to be. The words would wait. The coffee would not, so I drank it while it was hot and watched a lizard make its slow patrol along the wall.

I did explore, but minimally, almost apologetically. A walk to the nearest village took twenty minutes and yielded a bakery where I pointed at things and was rewarded with bread still warm from the oven. I ate it on a bench, feeding crumbs to sparrows that were bolder than British sparrows, more Italian in their approach to life. Another afternoon I drove, cautiously, to a local vineyard and tasted a white wine I cannot now name but remember as tasting of somewhere specific, which is the best thing you can say about a wine.

Mostly though, I did very little, and the doing of very little became the point. I noticed how the light changed across the terrace from morning to evening. I finished my novel, finally, and started another I had carried for months. I napped in the hammock, waking with the imprint of its weave on my arm and no clear sense of what hour it might be. I cooked simple things, badly, and ate them on the terrace with local cheese and that nameless wine.

On my final evening, I sat with my feet on the railing and watched the hills turn purple in the dusk. I thought about the me who had arrived, map-flustered and plan-heavy, and I felt something like fondness for her, though also the distinct sense that she had needed telling. The elderly men from my wrong turning had been right to shake their heads. Some things cannot be rushed, and a holiday in Friuli is emphatically among them.