The drive down from Rome had been going suspiciously well, which ought to have been my first warning. My partner was navigating, I was attempting to pronounce Italian road signs with the confidence of someone who once spent a long weekend in Florence, and we'd only had one minor argument about whether the sat nav was taking us the scenic route or simply the lost route. Then, about three miles outside Acquapendente, I spotted a farm shop by the roadside and insisted we stop for provisions. I emerged ten minutes later clutching a wheel of pecorino the size of a small frisbee, two bottles of local wine, some unidentifiable cured meat that I confidently told my partner was "probably wild boar," and absolutely no idea where I'd left the car keys.

Forty-five minutes of increasingly frantic searching later, involving me patting down pockets I'd already patted down three times and my partner developing that particular expression of loving patience mixed with barely suppressed fury, I found them in the cheese bag. Naturally. We arrived at the property as the late afternoon light was turning the Lazio countryside properly golden, and I was still brushing pecorino crumbs from my jacket like a man who'd been attacked by a very aggressive deli counter.

The house itself was one of those solid, unhurried stone buildings that looks like it has been sitting on its hillside since before anyone thought to write these things down, watching generations of holidaymakers arrive with overambitious shopping and underdeveloped cooking skills. We dumped our bags and immediately investigated the kitchen, which had that pleasingly no-nonsense arrangement of serious knives, a proper wooden chopping board scarred with decades of honest work, and a cooker that looked like it could handle anything we threw at it. I had plans. Grand plans. I was going to cook like a local, eat like a local, and probably need larger trousers like a local.

The following morning, we found the weekly market in Acquapendente's historic centre, which sprawls through the medieval streets with the organised chaos of people who have been doing this every Tuesday since approximately the Renaissance. I wandered between stalls in a state of greedy bewilderment, accumulating produce with the restraint of a man who had never before seen a tomato. Sun-warmed peaches that smelled like actual sunshine. Bunches of wild herbs tied with rough string. A wedge of ricotta so fresh it still held the warmth of whatever remarkable creature had produced it. I bought dried porcini from a woman who spoke no English and communicated entirely through expressive hand gestures and the occasional knowing laugh at my attempts to ask whether they needed soaking. She eventually just patted my arm and mimed something that I choose to believe meant "you'll figure it out, you sweet idiot."

Back at the house, I attempted my first proper meal with the manic confidence of the underqualified. The porcini risotto was, I maintain, a triumph of intention over execution. The rice had that slightly too-firm centre that suggests either authentic al dente texture or fundamental misunderstanding of cooking times, and I may have been too generous with the local olive oil, which poured with the viscosity and enthusiasm of something that genuinely wanted to be tasted. We ate it on the terrace as the light faded, accompanied by bread that we'd picked up from a bakery in the old town where the baker had been visibly unimpressed by my pointing and smiling technique. The wine, at least, was beyond criticism. The second bottle even more so.

By day three, I'd developed a routine of such intense food-focused pleasure that I'm slightly embarrassed to recount it in full. Morning coffee with cornetti from a bar in town where the owner had started recognising my terrible pronunciation and kindly stopped correcting me. Mid-morning wander through vegetable gardens that I had absolutely no right to be admiring but did anyway, making mental notes about varieties of beans that I would never successfully grow. Lunch was whatever we'd assembled from the market: ripe tomatoes with nothing but salt and oil, thick slices of that pecorino which had nearly caused an international key-related incident, bread that managed to be both chewy and somehow tender.

The evenings were where my culinary ambition really ran unchecked. One night I attempted to recreate a pasta sauce I'd watched a nonna make in a YouTube video, standing in a kitchen not dissimilar to mine but with approximately forty more years of practice. I had the right tomatoes, the right basil, the right sense of desperate optimism. What I produced was recognisably food, genuinely tasty food even, but it had that particular quality of home cooking that announces itself as such. My partner was diplomatic. The local wine helped everyone's critical faculties.

What I slowly came to understand, in that gentle way that holidays have of teaching you things you didn't know you needed to learn, was that the food here wasn't about my performance in the kitchen. It was about the accumulation of small pleasures: the particular crunch of a properly baked loaf, the way fresh pecorino softens just slightly in the warmth of your fingers, the discovery that wild boar salami actually was wild boar salami and I'd been right about something for once. I stopped trying to cook like someone else and started simply cooking with what was there, which turned out to be more than enough.

On our final morning, I made one last trip to the bakery, one last coffee at the bar where my pronunciation had improved just enough to be merely amusing rather than alarming. We packed the car with rather more olive oil than customs might strictly approve of, and I checked my pockets approximately seventeen times before we set off. The keys stayed where they were supposed to be. The cheese, I'm fairly certain, was entirely finished.