I have never been so relieved to see a stone wall in my life. After six hours of driving from Rome, my partner and I finally spotted the wrought-iron gates of our holiday let just outside Orte, only to realise I had been confidently navigating us to the wrong address for the last twenty minutes. The sat nav had decided "Orte" and "a farm near Viterbo" were basically the same thing, and I, in my post-motorway haze, had agreed with it. We turned up at a very confused man's vineyard before sheepishly retracing our steps.

The proper place, when we found it, was a converted stone house with a small pool and a terrace that looked out over olive groves. I stood there with my rucksack still on, sweating through my linen shirt, and felt that particular mix of triumph and mild humiliation that seems to define my holidays. My partner was already inspecting the outdoor furniture with the intensity of someone who has spent too long in a Fiat 500.

We had arrived in late June with ambitious plans. The original idea was to spend our week walking along the coast, exploring the rocky coves and sandy stretches between Santa Severa and Anzio. I had packed three pairs of walking shoes and a hat with a proper brim, the sort of kit that suggests a person who knows what they are doing. The weather, however, had other ideas. A heatwave had settled over Lazio like a heavy blanket, and by nine in the morning the temperature was already brushing thirty degrees. Our first attempt at a coastal hike ended with us retreating to a beach bar in Civitavecchia by eleven o'clock, sharing a granita and admitting defeat.

This became the pattern of our stay. We would wake early, full of intention, and set off for the Maremma coast or the headlands near Tarquinia. By mid-morning the sun would have turned the paths into something resembling a griddle, and we would find ourselves veering toward shade, then toward a cafe, then toward the sea itself. I had not expected to become a person who plans their walks around ice cream stops, but there we were. The coast was beautiful, mind you - those sudden limestone cliffs dropping to turquoise water, the smell of pine and salt - but we experienced it in fragments, in stolen morning hours and evening strolls when the heat finally loosened its grip.

Back at the house in Orte, we adapted. The pool, which I had initially dismissed as a bit of a luxury, became essential. We took to walking in the cooler hours around the property itself, through the olive groves and down the quiet lanes where the tarmac was soft with heat. There is something slightly absurd about travelling to Italy with visions of rugged coastal trekking and ending up doing gentle loops past someone's vegetable garden, but I found I did not mind. The lizards darting across the stones, the distant sound of church bells, the way the light turned golden in the evenings - it was not the adventure I had packed for, but it was the one I got.

On our last evening, we walked up to Orte's historic centre as the sun went down. The town sits perched on a tufa cliff, and from the top you can see for miles across the Tiber valley. We had done almost none of the walking we had planned, and I had the lightly sunburned nose and the collection of cafe receipts to prove it. Standing there with a warm breeze finally moving through the streets, I thought about how often my best holidays have been the ones where something went slightly wrong and I had to let go of the plan. The coast would still be there. The heatwave would not. And I had learned, at least, to double-check the sat nav before committing to a vineyard.