I'll admit I was already slightly frazzled before we even reached Anguillara Sabazia. We'd flown into Rome Fiumicino, picked up the hire car, and I was feeling rather pleased with myself for navigating the ring road without a single wrong turn. That smugness lasted precisely until I realised I'd been driving for twenty minutes with my sunglasses perched atop my head, squinting into the afternoon sun like a confused mole. My wife spotted them first and laughed so hard she nearly choked on her mint. "Three degrees and you're already a menace," she said. I couldn't really argue.

The approach to Anguillara Sabazia itself soon wiped away any lingering embarrassment. The town sits on the shore of Lake Martignano, one of those crater lakes that look impossibly blue in photographs and somehow even better in person. We wound down through olive groves, the sort of scenery that makes you involuntarily slow down and mutter something about needing to move here permanently. The kids had finally stopped asking if we were there yet, which I took as the highest possible compliment.

Our holiday home was one of those rustic stone cottages that manages to look exactly as advertised, which in my experience of holiday bookings is roughly equivalent to winning a modest lottery. Terracotta tiles, wooden shutters, a small garden with a barbecue that looked like it had seen some proper action. The key was waiting in the lockbox as promised, though I spent a good five minutes jiggling it while muttering darkly about modern technology, only to discover I'd been entering the code backwards. The children found this enormously entertaining. My wife did not.

Stepping inside for the first time, that particular hush of a cool stone house in warm weather, I felt something in my shoulders actually drop. You know that feeling when you've been carrying tension you didn't even know you had? The sitting room had beams overhead and comfortable-looking furniture with the slight wear that suggests actual living rather than museum-piece perfection. The kitchen opened onto a covered terrace where we immediately pictured ourselves eating every meal for the next fortnight, a fantasy that would last approximately until our first mosquito encounter.

The garden sloped gently down toward the lake, not quite waterfront but near enough to catch glimpses of silver through the trees. My daughter discovered the outdoor shower and immediately declared it her favourite thing in the world, though she'd yet to actually use it. My son was more taken with the barbecue, offering his services as official fire-starter despite having never successfully lit one in his life. I decided this was a skill worth acquiring on holiday.

What struck me most, wandering through those first few hours, was how completely the pace shifted. We were only forty minutes from central Rome, technically, yet we might as well have been in a different century. An elderly neighbour waved from her vegetable patch. A cat wandered across our path with the entitled air of someone who owned the place long before holiday lets existed. The afternoon light came through the shutters in stripes, and I found myself sitting on the terrace with a beer I hadn't planned to open yet, watching my family argue good-naturedly about who got which bedroom.

By evening we'd established our positions: children in the twin room with the sloped ceiling, us in the main bedroom with its view toward the water. We'd made a hash of the first supermarket shop, buying far too much fresh pasta and not nearly enough bin bags, a classic rookie error. The barbecue had been lit with more enthusiasm than skill, producing sausages that were charred outside and questionable within. We ate them anyway, on the terrace as planned, watching the last light fade over the lake.

I remember thinking, as the children finally stopped chattering and the night insects took over, that this was exactly what we'd needed. Not perfection, but something properly real. The mishaps were already becoming stories we'd tell. The place felt like somewhere we might actually belong, given enough time and better barbecue technique. That first evening, slightly sunburned and overfed and genuinely relaxed for the first time in months, I understood why people keep coming back to places like this. Some holidays you spend chasing experiences. Others, like this one, simply let you stop running.