I have never been so grateful for a sat nav's patience as I was driving up to Rocca di Papa. There we were, my lot crammed into the car like sardines, all set for our week in the Alban Hills, and I managed to miss the turn not once but three times. The third time, my youngest piped up from the back, "Dad, maybe the house doesn't want us to find it." Cheeky madam. But she had a point. Those winding roads up from the valley are not built for a bloke still getting used to driving on the right.

By the time we finally spotted the stone walls and terracotta roof of our holiday home, I was ready to kiss the gravel driveway. The place sits perched among the hills with views that make you forget every wrong turn. You can see right across the crater lake country, and on a clear afternoon, which this was, the light turns everything golden and slightly unreal. My wife actually said "blimey" out loud, and she never says blimey.

The house itself has that proper cottage feel, not the polished sort you see in magazines where nobody actually lives. This was lived-in comfortable, with a kitchen that smelled faintly of coffee and woodsmoke from previous guests. The kids bolted straight for the bedrooms to claim territory, which left me standing in the living room with our suitcases and a sudden realisation that I had packed approximately fourteen pairs of socks for a seven-day trip. My wife raised an eyebrow. "In case of emergency?" she asked. I blame the packing panic.

What struck me first was the quiet. Not silence exactly, because you could hear distant church bells and some dog having opinions further down the hill, but a kind of settled, deliberate quiet that makes your shoulders drop without you noticing. We had left the M25 chaos behind, and now there was just this hillside, these cypress trees, and a terrace that practically begged for a glass of something cold.

I made the mistake of attempting to operate the espresso machine within ten minutes of arrival. The resulting noise brought my wife running, convinced I had broken something expensive. I had not broken it, merely confused it. The coffee when it finally emerged was strong enough to wake the dead, which I needed after the drive. We sat on those terrace chairs, slightly wobbly ones that had clearly hosted decades of holidaymakers before us, and watched the light change over the valley.

The children emerged eventually, having established a complex bedroom hierarchy involving who got the window with the better view. They wanted to explore immediately, of course. The garden slopes down through olive trees and that scratchy Mediterranean shrubbery that always looks half-dead but somehow isn't. We found a tortoise shell, empty thank goodness, and a lemon tree with actual lemons on it. My daughter pocketed one like treasure.

That evening, we walked into the village proper, which took perhaps twelve minutes at the pace of an excited eight-year-old. Rocca di Papa is not a place that rushes. Elderly chaps sat outside bars arguing about football in that particularly Italian way that sounds furious but probably isn't. We found a small trattoria where nobody spoke much English and my phrasebook Italian got its first proper workout. The owner seemed genuinely touched by my mangled attempts, or possibly amused, hard to tell.

Walking back in the dark, the path lit by our phone torches, I found myself thinking about how rarely we do this. Not holidays specifically, but this particular rhythm of doing very little and not minding. No queues for attractions, no schedule beyond what feels right in the moment. My son was already asking if we could come back next year, and we had not even finished day one.

I did not answer him immediately. The stars were doing that thing they do in places without light pollution, and somewhere an owl started up. Tomorrow we might wander down to Castel Gandolfo, or we might simply sit on that wobbly terrace again and watch the world not go by. Either way, I thought, this is exactly the sort of holiday I did not know I needed until I got here, wrong turns and all.