I should have known the satnav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked suspiciously like someone's olive grove. Three hours out of Rome, sweating through the kind of August heat that makes you question every life choice, and there I was bouncing down a gravel track that grew narrower with every metre. My hire car, a Fiat 500 that had seemed charming at Fiumicino, now felt like a tin can on wheels. The branches scratched the paintwork with a sound like fingernails on a blackboard. I winced. The satnav cheerfully announced I had arrived. I had not arrived. I had arrived at a locked gate, a very large dog, and what I can only describe as a profound moment of existential dread.

Turning around took twenty minutes of three-point turns that became twelve-point turns. The dog watched with what I can only call professional interest.

When I finally found the proper road, winding up through vineyards towards Montefiascone, the whole sorry episode melted away like the gelato I'd abandoned in Rome. The house sat perched on the hillside with that effortless Italian elegance that makes you feel simultaneously thrilled and slightly underdressed. Terracotta roof, weathered stone walls, shutters painted that particular faded blue you only find in places where the sun works overtime. I stepped out of the car and the heat hit me properly for the first time. Not the suffocating city heat, but something drier, carrying the smell of cypress and baked earth and somewhere, distantly, someone making lunch.

The key was where promised, in a little metal box that required the dexterity of a safecracker and the patience of a saint. I possessed neither, and spent an embarrassing five minutes jiggling it while a lizard observed from the wall with obvious judgement. The door swung open to cool darkness and terracotta floors that felt blissful under my feet. I dumped my bag, found the kitchen, and immediately drank three glasses of water straight from the tap like a man emerging from the desert. The view from the terrace stopped me mid-gulp. Lake Bolsena stretched below, impossibly blue, with the far shore hazy in the heat shimmer. I had planned, that first afternoon, to walk down to the lake shore proper, to find the coastal path I'd read about, to begin my holiday of proper hiking and outdoor adventure.

Instead I sat on the terrace. Just sat. The heat had other plans for me, and I found I lacked the will to argue. A breeze stirred occasionally, enough to make the olive trees shimmer and whisper, not enough to actually cool anything. I watched a hawk circle lazily overhead, riding thermals without apparent effort. I envied it deeply.

By evening I'd moved perhaps ten metres total, mostly to fetch more water and a peach from the market in town that I'd squashed slightly in my luggage. It tasted of actual sunshine, which sounds pretentious until you've eaten a peach in the Italian countryside in late summer. The temperature dropped just enough to make the terrace bearable, then pleasant, then almost magical as the sky turned that particular violet-pink that seems to last forever in these latitudes. I could hear distant voices from neighbouring properties, the clink of glasses, someone laughing. The lake had turned silver in the fading light.

I thought about my walking boots, waiting in my bag. My carefully planned routes. The coastal path that would, I knew, be glorious in the cooler hours of early morning. Tomorrow, I decided. Tomorrow I would be the hiker I imagined myself to be. Tonight I would sit here with my squashed peach and my water and my profound gratitude that the satnav disaster had not ended with me in that olive grove forever.

The hawk had gone. Bats appeared instead, flickering against the darkening sky. Somewhere a dog barked, though not, I felt certain, the judgmental one from the locked gate. I had arrived, properly arrived, and my first impression was that sometimes the best thing a place teaches you is to stop trying so hard. The walking would come. The heat would, eventually, relent. For now, this was enough. More than enough, actually. It was rather perfect.