I have never been more grateful for a sat nav's calm voice than when it led me straight into a field of very unimpressed sheep somewhere outside Frosinone. "You have reached your destination," it announced, as a ewe stared directly into my soul. Turns out "Cassino" and "cassino in the middle of nowhere" are, technically, different coordinates. Forty minutes of increasingly sweaty reversing later, I finally found the proper turning for the villa, by which point I had named three of the sheep and was considering asking one for directions.

The approach to the property did a lot to soothe my frazzled nerves. A long gravel track wound through olive groves that looked like they had been posing for postcards since about 1952. The villa itself sat low and honey-coloured against the hillside, the sort of building that makes you immediately want to do absolutely nothing in it. Terracotta pots flanked the entrance. A vine of some description was doing something promising over a pergola. I could already feel my shoulders dropping somewhere around my knees.

The key was in a lockbox, which I fumbled with for an embarrassingly long time given there were only four digits. A local cat watched the entire performance with the weary patience of someone who has seen this exact scene approximately four hundred times. I named him Giuseppe. He did not seem to require my approval.

Inside, the place smelled of stone and clean linen and that particular stillness you only get in houses that have been properly empty for a while. The kitchen was simple and white-tiled, the sort that makes you want to buy tomatoes and do very little with them beyond slicing and adding salt. But it was the terrace that stopped me properly in my tracks. A long view opened up over rolling hills patchworked with fields and woodland, fading into a blue distance that I later learned was towards the Aurunci Mountains. A wooden table sat under a parasol. A sun lounger looked at me with unmistakable intent.

I unpacked with the urgency of a man who has just remembered that doing nothing requires immediate preparation. Swimsuit on. Book located. Sun cream applied with the dedication of someone who once spent a week the colour of a cooked lobster and has never emotionally recovered. Then I simply stopped. The terrace became my headquarters for the afternoon, moving only to adjust the angle of my chair or fetch another glass of water that I would forget to drink because I had already closed my eyes again.

The villa had a small pool, which I discovered was less for swimming and more for floating in a horizontal position while contemplating whether I could be bothered to swim two strokes to the other side. I could not. The water was that perfect temperature where you forget you are in it at all, becoming simply a slightly more buoyant version of yourself.

Evenings followed a rhythm that felt stolen from someone else's more sensible life. A slow walk down to the nearest village for bread and whatever looked good in the tiny alimentari. Back to slice mozzarella and tomatoes on that white-tiled counter, eaten on the terrace as the light went golden and the swallows started their evening circuits. I read more in a week than I had in the previous three months combined, mostly because there was genuinely nothing else competing for my attention. No notifications worth checking. No urgency beyond whether to open another bottle of local white.

On my final morning, I found myself sitting with my coffee for a full hour, watching mist lift off the hills like a slow exhalation. Giuseppe had apparently decided I was acceptable company and sat just out of petting range, which felt like the appropriate level of commitment for both of us. I thought about all the holidays where I had raced through sights and ticked boxes and come home needing another holiday, and I felt something close to smug about having finally understood the point.

The sheep, I am fairly certain, would not have recognised me.