I have never been very good at reading maps, which is how I found myself reversing down a single-track lane in rural Lazio while a very patient local farmer waited with his tractor and what I can only describe as a look of profound Italian resignation. We had been aiming for a cottage near Rieti, but my phone had other ideas, sending us first to a field of very surprised sheep and then to what appeared to be someone's private olive grove. The farmer pointed us back the way we came with a gesture that managed to be both helpful and faintly amused, and twenty minutes later we finally spotted the proper turning, half-hidden behind a tangle of cypress trees.

The cottage sat at the end of a gravel track, low and honey-coloured in the afternoon sun, with terracotta pots of geraniums flanking the door and a vine scrambling over a wooden pergola that cast dappled shade across a small terrace. My wife gave me that particular look she has, the one that says we will laugh about this eventually but perhaps not right this second. The children had already tumbled out of the car and were pressing their faces against the metal gate, shouting about a cat they had spotted on the garden wall. A tortoiseshell, utterly unbothered, washing its paws with deliberate slowness.

The key was where the owner had promised, tucked in a little stone alcove near the meter box, and the door opened with a satisfying creak onto cool stone floors and the faint smell of lavender. I had worried it might feel musty or cramped, the way some holiday lets do when the photos have been generous with the lighting, but the rooms were airy and simply furnished, with wooden shutters that threw striped shadows across whitewashed walls. The kitchen was small but properly equipped, not one of those maddening places with a single blunt knife and a saucepan with no handle. I opened the fridge to find a bottle of local white wine and a note wishing us a pleasant stay, which felt like a peace offering from the universe after my navigational failures.

The children discovered the pool before we had even unpacked, a modest rectangle of turquoise surrounded by grass that needed a trim and a few sun loungers with faded cushions. My daughter announced she would live there forever, which she has said at roughly half the places we have ever stayed, but there was something about the stillness of the valley beyond the garden that made it feel less like the usual holiday hyperbole. Hills folded into further hills, covered in the patchwork green of woodland and pasture, and somewhere in the middle distance a church bell struck the hour with a sound so clear it seemed almost physical.

I made myself useful by attempting to operate the outdoor barbecue, a handsome brick affair that looked straightforward enough until I realised I had no idea where the owner kept the charcoal. This involved another rummage through various outbuildings, one of which turned out to be a small workshop full of woodworking tools and the smell of sawdust, and another that housed a bicycle with flat tyres and several generations of spider. I found the charcoal eventually, behind a stack of terracotta roof tiles, and emerged triumphant if slightly cobwebbed to find my wife had already opened the wine and was sitting on the terrace with her shoes off, watching swallows dart and dive against the darkening sky.

That first evening we ate simple things, bread and cheese and tomatoes that actually tasted of something, which I know is a cliche about Italian holidays but remains true nonetheless. The children fell asleep at the table, more or less, and we carried them to bed with that particular tenderness that comes from too much sun and a second glass of wine. I stood outside for a while afterwards, listening to the cicadas and the distant bark of a dog, and thought about how I had nearly let my map incompetence sour the whole arrival, how easily I could have stayed flustered and irritable instead of letting the place do what it was clearly designed to do, which was to slow everything down to a more bearable pace.

The tortoiseshell cat appeared again, jumping down from the wall to inspect my ankles with professional detachment before disappearing into the darkness. I took it as a sign of approval, or at least of toleration, which felt like enough.