I have never been brilliant at reading maps, which is how I ended up trying to reverse a hire car down a lane barely wide enough for a Vespa, convinced I had found the shortcut to our villa in Soriano nel Cimino. My partner sat in the passenger seat making that particular face he reserves for my navigational disasters, one hand braced against the dashboard, the other scrolling Google Maps with the frantic energy of a man trying to prevent a minor international incident. We had been travelling since six that morning, Gatwick to Rome, Rome to the hire car place, then two hours of motorway that gradually narrowed into roads that wound through the Lazio countryside like dropped spaghetti.

The villa itself, when we finally found the proper turning, announced itself with a creaking iron gate and a gravel drive that crunched satisfyingly under the wheels. I stepped out into heat that felt like opening an oven door, stretched my legs, and promptly walked into a low-hanging branch from an olive tree. Welcome to Italy, I thought, rubbing my forehead and trying to look as though I had meant to do it.

The first thing that struck me was the silence. Not complete silence, of course. There were cicadas going at it with the enthusiasm of a Sunday league football crowd, and somewhere distant a dog barked in that lazy, half-hearted way dogs do in hot countries. But no traffic hum, no aeroplanes overhead, just the warm stillness of a place that has not hurried for centuries. The villa sat among trees that I later learned were chestnut and hazel, with a terrace that looked out over rolling hills the colour of dried sage and golden wheat. I stood there with my suitcase still unpacked, sweating slightly in my British motorway clothes, and felt something in my chest begin to unclench.

We did very little that first afternoon, which was precisely the point. My partner located the hammock and immediately claimed it with the territorial instinct of a cat finding a sunbeam. I settled onto a terrace chair with a book I had been carrying unread for six months, a glass of something cold and local, and the certain knowledge that I had no appointments, no emails worth answering, and nowhere to be. The book turned out to be mediocre, but I did not care. I read the same paragraph three times, looked up at a hawk circling somewhere over the valley, and read it again without retaining a word.

That evening we walked into the village, perhaps fifteen minutes at a strolling pace, though we took longer because I kept stopping to peer at things. The medieval quarter climbs the hillside in a satisfyingly haphazard fashion, and we found a small bar where an elderly man was watching football with the volume low and a beer going warm beside him. We ordered spritzes and some slices of pizza bianca, and I attempted my rusty Italian on the barman, who responded with the patient kindness of someone accustomed to tourists mangling his language. I asked for the bill and accidentally requested a duck instead, which at least made him smile.

The walk back in the dark, fireflies flickering in the hedgerows like faulty Christmas lights, felt like wandering through someone else's pleasant dream. I thought about how I had arrived stressed and sticky and slightly lost, how I had walked into a tree and ordered waterfowl, and how none of it mattered even slightly. There is a particular luxury in places that ask nothing of you but your presence, and Soriano nel Cimino asked for nothing at all. I went to sleep that night with the shutters open and the cicadas still at it, already planning the magnificent nothing I would accomplish tomorrow.