I have never been so grateful for a sat nav giving up on me as I was on the way to Magliolo. There I was, winding through the Ligurian hills in a hire car the size of a small bathtub, when the screen went blank and left me to the mercy of a road that seemed to narrow with every bend. I ended up in someone's olive grove, nose to nose with a very unimpressed goat, trying to reverse without collecting a century-old tree. A man in a faded blue apron wandered out from a farmhouse, watched me for a bit, then pointed wordlessly up the hill. I waved like a lunatic. He did not wave back.

That was late October, and I mention the month because it coloured everything that followed. Summer had packed its bags, but autumn had not quite unpacked properly either. The air sat somewhere between t-shirt and light jumper, that maddening in-between where you spend half the day adding and removing layers. The chestnut trees were dropping their fruit with a sound like slow applause, and the whole valley smelled of woodsmoke and something else I could not place until later - turned earth, I think, from the neighbouring plots being readied for winter.

The property itself sat perched on a slope, a solid stone house with shutters that had seen better decades and a terrace that looked down through a gap in the hills toward the distant shimmer of the sea. Not close enough to visit without purpose, but present enough to catch the late afternoon light. In high season I suspect the place would feel different - busier, louder, the terrace a competition for the best lounger. In October it felt borrowed rather than rented, as if the owners had simply stepped out and left me to mind things for a bit. The pool was covered, naturally, a tarpaulin sagging with leaves and the odd chestnut that had made a running jump from the overhang. I did not mind. There is something honest about a holiday home in its off-season clothes, no pretence of perpetual summer.

I arrived as the afternoon was softening, that particular October light that makes everything look slightly golden and slightly sad at the same time. The kitchen was cold in the way stone buildings are cold, that damp chill that clings until you get a fire going or accept that you will be wearing your coat indoors. I chose the fire, though my first attempt sent smoke billowing back into the room because I had not opened the flue properly. The goat had been a warning, perhaps. I am not naturally competent at rural living, and there is a particular humiliation to struggling with a wood burner while surrounded by evidence that generations have managed this without fuss.

By evening I had sorted myself out, more or less. I sat on the terrace with a glass of something local and watched the valley settle into darkness, the lights of distant villages appearing one by one like people arriving late to a party. The season meant early nights, no long balmy evenings stretching past ten. The dark came down properly, the kind of dark you forget exists if you live in a town, and with it a cold that sent me inside to burrow under blankets that smelled faintly of lavender and storage.

I fell asleep to the sound of chestnuts hitting the roof, irregular and unpredictable, nature's own percussion section. It was not the Liguria of postcards, perhaps. No azure waters, no bustling harbours, no Aperol glow. But there was something in the stripped-back quality of the place, the honesty of its autumn self, that felt like a small discovery. I had come expecting one thing and found another, and the goat, at least, had seen worse.