I have never been brilliant with directions, so it will surprise no one that my sat-nav and I had a falling out somewhere between Rome and the Lazio countryside. One moment I was humming along the A1, feeling terribly continental, and the next I was down a gravel track that grew narrower with every metre, flanked by olive groves that seemed to lean in and judge my life choices. The track ended at a locked gate with a sign that appeared to say something threatening about wild boar. I reversed for what felt like three miles, sweating through my linen shirt, until I found a farmer who looked at my hire car, looked at my face, and wordlessly pointed back the way I had come. I had missed the turning by roughly two hundred yards. Classic me.

By the time I finally pulled up at the property, the late September sun was doing that golden, slanting thing it does in early autumn, and I was in desperate need of a sit down and probably a small cry. But stepping out onto the gravel courtyard, I forgot my sat-nav trauma almost immediately. The place sat among rolling hills that were just beginning to turn from summer green to something softer, more honeyed. The air smelled different from home, not just warmer but weighted somehow, full of dried grass and woodsmoke from a distant fire and that particular dusty sweetness you only get in the Italian countryside when the seasons are shifting.

The pool, still open because the owners had told me September often delivers perfect swimming weather, looked almost too inviting, its surface catching the late afternoon light in long, slow ripples. I had worried about booking outside peak season, fretting that I would find everything shuttered and myself the only fool abroad. Instead, I discovered what the locals clearly already knew: this is when Lazio breathes out. The oppressive heat has broken, but the days remain long and warm enough for lingering outside. The nights, though, carry a chill now. I stood on the terrace that first evening in a jumper I had not expected to need, watching the sky turn from apricot to deep violet over the distant outline of Orvieto on its volcanic plug, and felt something in my shoulders release that I had not realised I was holding.

The property itself felt shaped by this in-between time. The thick stone walls kept the afternoon warmth stored inside, so opening the shutters each morning was like unwrapping a present. But by evening, the terracotta floors had cooled, and I found myself pulling on socks and lighting the wood-burning stove that the owners had thoughtfully prepared with kindling and instructions in charmingly direct English. I sat beside it that first night, eating bread and pecorino I had bought from a farm shop that was still open because, as the woman there told me with a shrug, "September is for the last tomatoes." She said it as if this were universally understood, and I nodded as if it were.

What struck me most, wandering those first few days, was how the season dictated every rhythm. The grape harvest was finishing in nearby vineyards, and the roads were scattered with purple stains where trucks had passed. Farmers burned prunings in the fields, sending thin columns of smoke into still afternoons. In the village below, perhaps two miles away, a poster advertised a sagre, one of those village food festivals that spring up around the harvest, this one dedicated to the new oil that would be pressed in coming weeks. I went, naturally, and stood among locals in jackets now, eating fried artichokes and feeling smug about my timing.

The mornings had a mistiness that burned off by ten, leaving days of extraordinary clarity. I walked tracks through woodland where the chestnuts were beginning to fall, their spiky cases splitting on the path. Once, I startled a wild boar, or more accurately it startled me, crashing away through undergrowth that was already thinning, revealing stone walls and abandoned terraces from farms long gone. The landscape felt peeled back somehow, more honest than in high summer when everything is hidden under dense green.

By my final days, the light had shifted again, becoming more angled, more insistent in its beauty. I swam in the pool one last time, the water shockingly cold compared to that first afternoon, and dried myself in sun that had lost its fierce edge. Sitting on the terrace with a glass of local white, I watched swallows gathering on the telephone wires, preparing for departure, and felt an odd kinship. We were both passing through at the right moment, catching this place in its generous, transitional grace.

I left on a morning when the mist did not lift until noon, driving back to Rome through a countryside slowly closing itself down for winter, feeling I had understood something about timing, about patience, about the particular wisdom of arriving somewhere just as it is changing.