I have never been more grateful for a sat nav than I was driving into Montefiascone last September, though I will admit the thing did try to send me up what I can only describe as a goat track masquerading as a road. There I was, sweating profusely in a hire car the size of a small boat, convinced I was about to become a permanent feature of the Lazio countryside, wedged between two olive groves with a bumper full of twigs and a very flat tyre. The mishap, because there is always one with me, came when I finally found the proper road and promptly reversed into a stone wall that had been standing since roughly the twelfth century. The wall was fine. My dignity and the rear parking sensor were not.

The property itself sat perched above Lake Bolsena like someone had simply dropped a rather handsome stone farmhouse from the sky and decided it looked perfectly at home there. My first thought, after I stopped swearing at the wall, was that I had accidentally booked somewhere far too nice for someone whose culinary achievements back in Clapham extended to burning toast and occasionally ordering something ambitious from Deliveroo. The kitchen, I discovered with some trepidation, was enormous. Terracotta tiles, wooden beams, a cooker that looked like it had actual opinions about cooking. I stood in the doorway holding a carrier bag of emergency pasta from a motorway services and felt genuinely judged by a kitchen appliance.

The following morning I walked into Montefiascone proper, which took roughly twelve minutes and involved me getting slightly lost in a vineyard, because of course I did. The town market was already in full swing in the piazza, stalls heaving with produce that looked like it had been painted rather than grown. Tomatoes the size of cricket balls, still warm from the sun. Bunches of basil that filled the air with something so intensely green and fragrant I nearly walked into a fountain. I bought far too much, as one does, including some local lentils from a woman who spoke no English and communicated entirely through expressive hand gestures and the occasional disapproving look at my selection technique.

That evening I attempted my first proper self-catering effort. The kitchen, I had decided, and I were going to make peace. I had pecorino, I had those enormous tomatoes, I had olive oil that tasted like liquid sunshine, and I had ambition. What I did not have, it transpired, was any actual ability. The bruschetta was acceptable, if you ignored the fact that I had slightly blackened the bread while trying to locate the grill function. The pasta with tomato sauce was better, largely because fresh ingredients that good basically cook themselves and require minimal intervention from idiots. I ate it on the terrace as the sun went down over the lake, drinking a glass of Est! Est!! Est!!! wine that I had bought mostly because the name made me laugh, and I felt something shift. Not a sudden transformation into a competent cook, obviously. More a realisation that perhaps I had been approaching food all wrong, treating it as something to be conquered rather than something to be quietly grateful for.

The next few days settled into a rhythm of morning market visits and increasingly experimental lunches. I discovered the local bakery, where an ancient man sold me bread that was somehow both crusty and soft in a way British supermarkets have never managed. I found a tiny shop selling porchetta by the slice, the fat rendered to something almost translucent, the meat fragrant with wild fennel. I ate it standing in the street like a proper local, grease running down my wrist, not caring in the slightest.

My cooking attempts grew bolder and only occasionally disastrous. There was an incident with aubergines that I prefer not to discuss in detail. The less said about my attempt at artichoke preparation the better. But I learned to make a decent amatriciana, frying guanciale until the fat turned translucent, adding tomatoes that actually tasted of something, finishing with pecorino Romano because that is what you do in this part of the world. I made it four times in ten days, each version slightly different, each one eaten on that same terrace with the same view, each one accompanied by wine and the growing sense that I was, against all expectation, beginning to understand something.

The local trattoria in town became my backup plan for evenings when I admitted defeat. There I ate lake fish grilled simply with lemon, and pasta with local mushrooms, and watched Italians eat with the kind of unhurried attention that made my usual British habit of shovelling food down while doing three other things feel slightly shameful. I slowed down. I chewed properly. I talked to people, or at least attempted to, my terrible Italian meeting their patient smiles halfway.

By the end of the fortnight my kitchen and I had reached an understanding. We would never be close friends, but we had learned to coexist. I left with a bottle of that ridiculous wine, some lentils I was convinced I would cook properly at home, and the certain knowledge that I would reverse into something else within a month of returning to Clapham. Some things, after all, do not change. But my relationship with food, and with the quiet pleasure of preparing it slowly in a kitchen that overlooked an ancient lake, had shifted in ways I was still unpacking. I still burn toast, mind. But now I burn it with a certain Lazio-infused sense of possibility.