I have never been so relieved to see a row of cypress trees in all my life. After six hours of driving from Rome Fiumicino, during which I managed to take precisely one wrong turn that added forty minutes of increasingly narrow Italian lanes to our journey, we finally spotted the gates of our holiday let near Montalto di Castro. The sat nav had given up on us somewhere outside Tarquinia, and my partner had adopted that particular expression of patient suffering that British people perfect after decades of queueing and disappointing weather.

The mishap, though, came at the very end. I had spent the final ten minutes of the drive rehearsing my Italian greeting for the key holder, a confident little speech about our journey and our excitement. What actually came out, when a smiling woman appeared at the gate, was something closer to "buongiorno, siamo molto... hungry?" She looked at me with the kindness one reserves for confused tourists, handed over the keys, and gestured toward the villa with what I choose to believe was amusement rather than pity.

The property itself was exactly the sort of place that makes you immediately start planning meals. A covered terrace with a proper brick barbecue, a kitchen that looked like it had seen some serious cooking over the years, and most importantly, a local market just a ten-minute drive away in Montalto di Castro town. I unpacked our bags with one eye already on dinner.

That first evening, we did what any sensible person would do after a day of motorway driving and linguistic humiliation. We found the nearest supermarket, bought far too much, and attempted to cook everything at once. The kitchen had a proper gas hob, the sort that actually responds when you turn it down, unlike the electric nightmare I endure at home. I made a simple pasta with tomatoes, garlic, and basil that tasted better than anything I had produced in months. Perhaps it was the local olive oil, thick and peppery. Perhaps it was the fact that I was no longer behind the wheel of a hire car. Either way, we ate on the terrace until the mosquitoes finally drove us inside.

The next morning, the real education began. The weekly market in Montalto di Castro is not one of your polished tourist affairs. It sprawls through the town centre with a cheerful chaos that immediately overwhelmed my British instinct to queue politely and examine everything before committing. I bought peaches from a man who simply would not let me leave without eating a sample first, dripping juice down my wrist while he nodded approvingly. I found pecorino that smelled properly of sheep and caves, not the sanitised version sold in UK supermarkets. There were tomatoes that actually smelled of tomatoes, which feels like a revelation when you are used to the watery disappointments of a British summer.

My self-catering ambitions grew with each passing day. I attempted a proper cacio e pepe on the third evening, having watched approximately seven YouTube videos on the subject. The result was... educational. The cheese clumped slightly, which I choose to blame on my technique rather than the excellent pecorino I had purchased. We ate it anyway, sitting outside as the light faded over the olive groves, and agreed that even a failed cacio e pepe in Lazio beats a successful ready meal in Surrey.

By the end of the week, I had established something of a routine. Morning coffee on the terrace, then a trip to the market or the local alimentari for whatever looked good. Long lunches of bread, cheese, and tomatoes that needed nothing more than salt and olive oil. Evening cooking that grew gradually more ambitious, though I never quite mastered the local art of making everything look effortless.

What struck me most, looking back, was how completely the holiday became about food in the best possible way. Not restaurant meals, though we had a few of those, but the simple pleasure of cooking with ingredients that needed so little interference. I returned home with a bottle of local olive oil, some vague intentions about changing how I cook, and the certain knowledge that my cacio e pepe still needs work. Some things, I suppose, require more than a week in Italy to perfect.