I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when the sat-nav tried to send me up a goat track. We'd flown into Rome Fiumicino, picked up the hire car, and set off towards Poggio Catino with that particular blend of optimism and mild panic that comes from driving on the wrong side of the road for the first time in months. My partner was navigating, which meant holding my phone at an awkward angle and saying "I think it's this way" with increasing uncertainty.

The mishap came about forty minutes from our destination. A road sign pointed left towards Poggio Catino, but our electronic friend insisted we carry straight on. We obeyed the machine, as modern folk do, and found ourselves climbing a narrow lane that grew progressively more agricultural. At one point we had to stop while a very old man herded three goats past our bumper. He waved cheerfully, entirely unbothered by our intrusion. The lane ended in a farmyard. A large dog considered us with philosophical detachment. I performed a twelve-point turn while my partner studied the map with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb.

We found the proper road eventually, of course, and wound our way up through the Sabine hills as the afternoon light turned golden. The landscape here is nothing like the postcard Tuscany of popular imagination. Lazio feels wilder, less curated, full of sudden valleys and unexpected ruins. We passed through a village where an elderly woman was beating a rug over her balcony with what I can only describe as operatic commitment.

The property itself sits just outside Poggio Catino proper, a cluster of stone buildings that have clearly been standing since before anyone thought to write things down. Our host, Marco, emerged from what I initially took to be a toolshed but was apparently his office. He spoke English with the fluent eccentricity of someone who learned it from elderly BBC broadcasts, and he seemed genuinely delighted by our late arrival. "You found the goat road," he said, with the satisfaction of a man who has watched many strangers make the same error.

The villa was simple and honest, with terracotta floors that stayed cool even in the warmth of early October and shutters that creaked satisfyingly. But what struck me immediately was the silence. Not the absence of sound, exactly, but a particular quality of quiet that I had forgotten existed. Distant church bells. Insects in the olive trees. The occasional tractor, labouring somewhere out of sight.

We dumped our bags and went wandering almost at once, too restless from the journey to settle. Marco had mentioned a path that led down towards a stream, "if you like to be lost." I do, as it happens. My partner tolerates this tendency with the patient resignation of someone who has spent many holidays following vague directions towards uncertain destinations.

The path was poorly marked, which I consider a feature rather than a flaw. Within ten minutes we had left any obvious route and were simply walking through countryside, following what seemed like animal tracks and the occasional glimpse of water. We found an abandoned chapel, door hanging open, interior full of swallows. We found a spring where the water tasted of something I can only describe as green. We found ourselves, repeatedly, in places that felt discovered rather than visited.

By the time we stumbled back towards the villa, the sun had nearly set and we were both mildly scratched from brambles, slightly damp from an ill-advised attempt to cross the stream on stepping stones, and happier than we had been in months. Marco was sitting outside with a glass of wine, unsurprised by our dishevelled return. "Tomorrow," he said, "I will tell you about the Roman bridge nobody goes to." We sat with him as the darkness gathered, already planning to ignore whatever directions he gave us and find our own way there instead.