I have never been a natural navigator, so it will surprise absolutely no one that I managed to get us spectacularly lost somewhere between Orte and Vitorchiano. The sat nav had given up in a huff, my phone had decided this was the ideal moment to overheat, and I was stubbornly insisting that the gravel track we were bouncing along was "definitely a shortcut." My partner, who had been making increasingly pointed comments about stopping for directions, finally broke into a grin when a tiny nonna appeared at her garden gate and wordlessly pointed back the way we had come. We had missed the turning by a good two miles. I waved my thanks, reversed with what dignity I could muster, and tried to pretend this had all been part of the plan.

The proper road, when we found it, wound through olive groves and past crumbling stone walls that looked older than most countries. Vitorchiano itself appeared suddenly, perched on its tufa cliff like something from a slightly faded postcard. Our holiday home sat just below the old town, a solid stone house with shutters the colour of faded terracotta and a garden that seemed to have been growing in happy chaos since approximately 1987. The key was exactly where the owner had said it would be, under a terracotta pot beside the wisteria that had completely engulfed the pergola. I felt disproportionately proud of locating it.

The first thing that struck me, once we had wrestled our cases through the door and I had stopped fussing about whether I had remembered the adaptors, was the silence. Not the uncomfortable, watchful silence of an empty building, but a thick, honeyed sort of quiet that made you want to lower your voice without quite knowing why. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked once and apparently thought better of continuing. A gecko darted across the terrace wall. That was the extent of the drama.

We did not do much that first afternoon, and this turned out to be the pattern of the days that followed. There is a particular pleasure in arriving somewhere and realising that your most pressing commitment is deciding whether to read in the garden or on the terrace. I chose the terrace, largely because it had a view down the valley towards the Tiber, though I will confess that I spent more time watching the swallows than turning pages. My partner disappeared into the garden with a glass of something cold and was discovered an hour later having made friends with a particularly bold lizard.

The house itself had that comfortable shabbiness that comes from being genuinely lived in rather than staged for photographs. The kitchen tiles were slightly wonky. The sofa had the permanent imprint of previous guests who had clearly had the same idea about afternoon naps. There was no air conditioning, which I had worried about, but the stone walls kept things surprisingly cool, and the ceiling fan in the bedroom made a comforting whir that became the soundtrack of our stay.

We wandered into Vitorchiano proper on our second morning, though "wandered" suggests more purpose than we actually possessed. The old town clings to its cliff in a way that makes you grateful for sensible shoes and slightly breathless. We found a tiny bar where the coffee was excellent and the proprietor seemed faintly amused by our attempts at Italian. We sat in the piazza for the better part of an hour, watching an elderly gentleman conduct what appeared to be a very serious negotiation with his own pigeons.

The days settled into a rhythm that I can only describe as luxuriously unproductive. Mornings began slowly, with proper coffee and whatever we had managed to procure from the small shop in the village. Afternoons dissolved into reading, dozing, and occasional half-hearted debates about whether we ought to do something more constructive. We never did reach a satisfactory conclusion on this point, which I now consider a significant achievement.

One afternoon, feeling briefly energetic, we attempted a walk along a marked path through the surrounding countryside. The markers, we discovered, had been installed with what I can only describe as a mischievous sense of humour, and we found ourselves in a field of very surprised sheep with no clear idea how we had arrived there. We laughed more than was probably warranted, turned around, and found our way back by the simple expedient of keeping the village in sight. The sheep, I am pleased to report, held no grudges.

What I remember most, though, are the small, unscripted moments. The way the light changed across the terrace in the late afternoon, turning everything golden and slightly unreal. The discovery that the fig tree in the garden was actually productive, and the subsequent realisation that we had no idea when figs were ripe. The evening we opened a bottle of local white wine that cost less than a London coffee and sat watching the swifts until it was properly dark.

I had arrived with a mental list of things I ought to see and do, places within reasonable distance that featured in guidebooks. I looked at it exactly once, on our third morning, and then deliberately misplaced it under a cushion. There is something to be said for allowing a place to simply be what it is, rather than treating it as a series of attractions to be ticked off. The Lazio countryside does not perform for visitors. It simply continues its ancient, sun-baked existence, and if you are fortunate enough to find yourself within it for a while, the greatest courtesy you can offer is to slow down enough to notice.

On our final morning, I woke early and took my coffee outside in the grey half-light before dawn. The swallows were already moving, and somewhere a cockerel was making half-hearted attempts at his job. I thought about our wrong turn on arrival, the nonna's patient pointing, the ridiculous sheep. I thought about how rarely I allow myself this kind of aimlessness, and how much my body and mind had apparently needed it.

The sun came up properly as I sat there, and I did not move for a very long time.