I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me up a goat track outside Viterbo. Three hours from Rome, two wrong turns, and one spectacularly ill-advised shortcut later, I finally spotted the stone walls of the Bagnoregio property peeking through the cypress trees. My hire car, a Fiat 500 that had begun the journey white and was now distinctly terracotta, wheezed up the final gravel incline with all the enthusiasm of a donkey who has just spotted a steep hill.

The mishap, if you can call it that, happened about twenty minutes prior. I had stopped at what I believed to be the property entrance, marched up to a handsome wooden door with my booking confirmation held aloft like a passport at border control, and attempted to introduce myself to a very confused elderly gentleman who was simply trying to enjoy his midday riposo. Through a combination of broken Italian, wild gesticulation, and the slow realisation that I was standing in the wrong farmyard entirely, I learned that I had confused two nearly identical driveways separated by a single olive grove. The gentleman, to his eternal credit, found this hilarious rather than alarming. He pointed me onward with the resigned patience of someone who has watched many a lost tourist make this exact pilgrimage.

When I did finally arrive at the correct address, the difference was immediate and rather humbling. The property sat nestled into the hillside with that particular Lazio stillness that makes you conscious of every rustle and birdcall. A covered terrace ran along the front, already dappled with afternoon light filtering through the vines overhead. I could see the private swimming pool glinting below, though at that particular moment its turquoise invitation felt almost mocking given my dishevelled state.

The owner emerged before I could even attempt another awkward introduction, which was fortunate. She took in my dusty shoes, my slightly manic expression, and what I can only assume was a spectacular case of helmet hair from driving with the windows down, and simply said, "The road teaches patience." I decided this was probably a kindness rather than a criticism.

Stepping inside, the coolness of the stone walls enveloped me like a physical thing. The kitchen opened directly onto that vine-covered terrace, and I could already picture the entirely unnecessary complexity of meals I would attempt to cook there with local ingredients I had no business handling professionally. The living space felt genuinely lived-in rather than staged, with wooden beams overhead that looked as though they had witnessed several centuries of similar arrivals and departures.

I dumped my bags with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who had personally laid every mile of tarmac between Rome and this hillside. Through the windows, the Lazio countryside rolled away in proper layers, green and gold and hazy in the distance. Somewhere out there, Civita di Bagnoregio perched on its volcanic plateau, though from this vantage it remained hidden, saving something for tomorrow.

That evening, I sat on the terrace with a bottle of Orvieto Classico that cost less than a London sandwich and watched the light change over the fields. The wrong farmyard, the stubborn sat nav, the Fiat now permanently coated in Italian dust, all of it settled into something approaching contentment. The road had indeed taught patience, or at least it had taught me that I possessed very little of it and might consider working on that. The swimming pool remained undisturbed, the cypress trees stood motionless, and somewhere a dog barked in a way that felt more punctuation than interruption.

I raised my glass to the elderly gentleman in his wrong farmyard, hoping his riposo had been worth the interruption, and decided that first impressions, like wrong turns, sometimes deliver you exactly where you needed to be.