I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send us down what looked like a goat's footpath somewhere north of Rome. Three hours of decent motorway driving, and then suddenly we were threading our hired Fiat through lanes barely wider than a supermarket trolley. My wife, Sarah, was doing that brilliant thing where she goes completely silent, which in fifteen years of marriage I have learned to interpret as absolute fury. The children had given up asking "are we there yet" somewhere around Viterbo and had descended into a sullen, screen-lit trance.

The mishap, when it came, was almost embarrassingly predictable. I had stopped to check a paper map, because apparently I am a man in a period drama, and in my wisdom I parked on what I thought was a generous verge. It was not a verge. It was a drainage ditch disguised by long grass. The front wheel went in with a pathetic crunch, and there we were, tilting at an angle that made the car look like it was having a little sit down. A local farmer in a tiny three-wheeled truck appeared from nowhere, which is a skill Italians seem born with, and within ten minutes he had towed us out with a rope that looked older than my father. I understood perhaps four words of his rapid commentary, but his expressive hand gestures conveyed exactly what he thought of English drivers and their relationship with Italian countryside topography.

We arrived at the Trevinano properly flustered, dusty, and in that peculiar emotional state where you are desperate for everything to be lovely but braced for further disaster. The key was in the lockbox as promised, which felt like a minor miracle. I fumbled with the code, dropped it twice, and finally got the door open with the theatrical flourish of a man who had meant to do it that way all along.

And then, properly then, the whole mood shifted.

The place smelled of stone and wood and something faintly herby that I later realised was rosemary growing just outside the kitchen window. The sitting room had these gloriously uneven terracotta floors that made every footstep sound satisfyingly solid, and beams across the ceiling that were clearly older than any building I had ever set foot in back home. Sarah actually laughed, properly laughed, for the first time since the goat path. The children bolted upstairs to claim bedrooms, and I stood in the kitchen with its ancient-looking but somehow functional cooker and felt something in my shoulders release.

I made a pot of tea with supplies we had brought from a supermarket in Viterbo, because I am English and priorities are priorities. We sat on the little terrace with our mugs, looking out at nothing more dramatic than rolling hills and distant cypress trees and a sky that seemed to have been painted by someone showing off. A gecko darted across the wall. Somewhere, a dog barked with the lazy rhythm of an animal with absolutely nothing to prove.

That first evening, we did nothing. This is important. We did not explore. We did not tick off sights. We ate bread and cheese and tomatoes that actually tasted of something, and the children splashed in the pool until their lips went blue, and Sarah and I sat with a bottle of local white wine that cost less than a London coffee and watched the light change across the valley. I kept thinking about that farmer, and his rope, and his magnificent contempt for my driving. I thought about how I would have let that ruin a holiday once, how I would have carried the embarrassment like a suitcase, and how instead it had already become something we were laughing about, something that belonged to the place, something that had happened to us here.

The Trevinano is not fancy. The shower takes a moment to sort itself out temperature-wise. The WiFi comes and goes like a polite guest who does not want to overstay. But it is proper, in a way that matters. It is the kind of place that reminds you that a family break does not need to be engineered within an inch of its life. It needs a pool, a terrace, a kitchen that makes you want to cook something simple, and enough space for everyone to remember that they actually like each other.

By the time we turned in, the children were asleep before their heads hit the pillows, and Sarah and I stood at the window watching moths dance around the outside light. I thought about the journey, the ditch, the farmer, the first sight of the place. I thought about how holidays are not really about arriving somewhere perfect, but about arriving somewhere real, and letting it do its work on you.

We slept better than we had in months.