I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through a field of very unimpressed sheep. Twelve hours after leaving Gatwick, there I was, bumping down a gravel track in Lazio with a hire car full of suitcases and a passenger who had long since stopped finding my "are we nearly there yet?" routine amusing. My other half, who had nobly volunteered to navigate, had fallen into that peculiar doze where the head lolls but the mouth somehow stays open. Romantic, it was not.

The mishap, when it came, was spectacularly small and entirely my fault. We finally spotted the stone walls of Montebuono rising through the cypress trees, and in my excitement to announce our arrival, I knocked an entire paper cup of cold coffee into my own lap. Not a splash, not a dribble. A full immersion. I sat there, sticky and defeated, as a very elegant local woman walked past with her dog and offered a sympathetic smile that somehow managed to convey both pity and mild amusement. I waved back with what dignity I could muster, which was absolutely none.

Stepping out of the car was when it finally hit me. The air up here carries something different. Thinner, perhaps, or just scrubbed clean by all those hills rolling away towards the horizon. The property itself sits in that sweet spot where you feel properly removed from everything without being inconveniently remote. Stone walls the colour of honey, a terrace that looks like it has been patiently waiting for someone to sit down with a glass of something local and simply stop moving for a while.

The key was exactly where promised, tucked in one of those small metal boxes that always make me feel like I am in a very low-stakes spy film. The door swung open with that satisfying weight of old wood, and the interior smelled of beeswax and something faintly herby that I later learned was rosemary growing just outside the kitchen window. Terracotta floors, beamed ceilings, furniture that has clearly been chosen by someone who understands that a holiday home should feel like somewhere you actually want to live rather than somewhere you merely tolerate.

I wandered through with the particular arrogance of someone who has just paid for the privilege, coffee-stained trousers and all. The kitchen opened onto that terrace I had spotted from outside, and I found myself doing that thing where you keep stepping forward expecting the view to disappoint, and it simply refuses to. Olive groves, distant hills, the kind of light that makes you understand why painters lose their minds over this particular corner of Italy.

My partner had by now revived sufficiently to locate the bedroom and perform that universal ritual of testing mattress firmness with a small experimental bounce. Approval was muttered. I unpacked with the chaotic energy of someone who has been in transit too long, scattering possessions with abandon, already half-convinced I would never want to leave.

By evening we had found the village proper, if you can call a handful of houses and one determined little shop a village. Provisions were acquired with pointing and apologetic smiles. Back at Montebuono, we sat on that terrace with bread, cheese, and wine that cost embarrassingly little, watching the light fade and the first bats appear. My trousers had dried to a state of merely suspicious-looking rather than actively catastrophic.

That first night, sleep came with the completeness of the properly exhausted. I remember thinking, just before dropping off, that the sat nav's sheep detour and my coffee incident had perhaps been necessary sacrifices. You cannot arrive somewhere this quietly spectacular without earning it slightly.