I should have known the holiday had truly begun when I managed to get our hire car wedged between two olive trees not three minutes from the property. My wife was giving me that particular look, the children were already asking if this counted as an adventure, and I was frantically reversing while pretending I had absolutely meant to take that shortcut through a working farm. Welcome to Montebuono, I thought, and welcome to my particular gift for turning a simple arrival into a minor village spectacle.

We had driven up from Rome that morning, a journey that started with grand plans of singing along to Italian radio and ended with me gripping the steering wheel through a series of increasingly narrow lanes that seemed designed to test both vehicle and marriage. The Sat Nav had given up somewhere near Viterbo, leaving us to follow hand-painted signs that pointed hopefully toward various agriturismi. I kept telling everyone to look out for wildflowers and rolling hills, which sounded poetic until someone needed the toilet and the poetic charm wore rather thin.

Then we rounded a bend and there it was, perched among vineyards and ancient oaks, the sort of stone farmhouse that makes you momentarily forget you are a middle-aged man from Hertfordshire with a tendency to overpack. The building had that wonderful weathered look, all terracotta roof tiles and wooden shutters that had clearly seen decades of summers. A wisteria vine clambered over one corner, dropping purple blooms onto the terrace like nature's own welcome mat. The children were already out of the car before I had properly stopped, my daughter declaring that she absolutely must live here forever, my son investigating whether the pool was as inviting as it appeared.

I stood there for a moment, hire car still faintly smelling of olive branch, and felt something shift. Not the profound spiritual transformation you read about in travel magazines, but something simpler and perhaps more honest. The quiet was extraordinary, broken only by cicadas and the distant clank of someone doing something agricultural. I realised I had been holding my shoulders somewhere near my ears for the past fortnight, and they were slowly beginning to descend to their proper position.

The owners had left us a bottle of local white wine and some pecorino cheese, a gesture so genuinely warm that I felt slightly embarrassed by my earlier flustered state. We sat on the terrace as the afternoon turned golden, the children splashing in the pool, my wife and I sharing that cheese with our fingers because someone had forgotten to unpack the proper knife. It was not sophisticated. It was not the sort of moment that would impress anyone on social media. But it was absolutely ours, slightly chaotic and completely perfect.

That evening I cooked pasta badly on the outdoor barbecue, because apparently I cannot resist the urge to char things over open flame despite limited talent. We ate at a rickety table as bats flickered overhead and someone in a nearby farmhouse played an accordion with more enthusiasm than skill. The children were asleep before nine, exhausted by sunshine and swimming. My wife and I stayed up with the dregs of that wine, not talking much, just watching the darkness settle over the valley and feeling profoundly grateful that we had somehow found our way here, wrong turns and olive tree incidents included.

Some holidays announce themselves with grandeur. This one simply opened its arms and let us stumble into something we had not known we needed.