The thing about driving to Solto Collina is that you convince yourself the sat nav knows what it is doing, right up until the moment it very clearly does not. We had been winding through Lombardy for the better part of three hours, the lake glinting through the trees, me smugly declaring that I had finally mastered Italian roundabouts. Then the road narrowed to something a goat would hesitate on, and my partner, who had been suspiciously quiet, said the words no driver wants to hear: "I think that was our turn, back there by the olive grove." There followed twenty minutes of reversing, gesturing at bewildered locals, and a small but humiliating incident with a low stone wall that I maintain was not entirely my fault. By the time we found the proper road, I had aged approximately fifteen years. The goat track, it turned out, was someone's driveway. They were watching from their window with what I can only describe as professional interest.

But then we arrived, and I understood why people bother with all the fuss. The place sits above Lake Iseo, not as famous as its big sisters Como and Garda, which is precisely the point. You get the Lombardy sunshine without the coach parties. Our terrace looked out over olive trees and down to water so blue it seemed almost rude. I stood there with a warm beer from the journey, still slightly vibrating from the goat track incident, and felt something in my shoulders actually drop. Not metaphorically. Actually.

The first morning set the tone. We woke without alarm, which never happens, and I made coffee in the little kitchen while my partner investigated the garden. She returned with figs from a tree she claimed was technically communal property, a legal argument I chose not to examine too closely. We ate them with bread from the bakery in Solto Collina village, ten minutes down the hill, where the woman behind the counter spoke no English and communicated entirely through confident pointing. I respected this enormously. By ten o'clock we were on the terrace with books we had been meaning to read since approximately 2019. I managed four pages before dozing off in the sun. This became the pattern.

We did explore, in our fashion. The village itself is small enough to wander in twenty minutes, which suited us perfectly. There is a church, naturally, with a view that makes you understand why they built it there. We found a bar where the owner seemed mildly surprised to see us, in a pleasant way, and served espresso that made me realise I had been drinking something else entirely back home. The lake shore at Castro, just below, provided the requisite Italian holiday moment of watching elderly men in small boats doing something patient and inexplicable with fishing lines. We never did establish what they were catching. Possibly nothing. Possibly that was the point.

One afternoon we attempted a walk to the nearby village of Riva di Solto, following a path through olive terraces that must have been there for centuries. I say attempted because we stopped after twenty minutes at a bench with another view, another book, another doze. The path remained unwalked beyond that point. I felt briefly guilty about this, some inherited Protestant voice suggesting achievement, then consciously decided to ignore it. The bench was excellent. The shade was perfect. Achievement is overrated.

The days developed their own rhythm. Morning coffee, terrace, perhaps a brief expedition for supplies. Afternoon reading, swimming if we could be bothered to drive down, more reading if we could not. Evenings involved simple cooking with tomatoes that actually tasted of something, wine from Franciacorta just along the lake, and the particular pleasure of having nowhere to be. I finished two books. My partner finished one and started telling me about it in such detail that I feel I have read it too. We played cards badly. We watched the light change on the mountains. On our last day I realised I had not checked my email in six days, not through virtue but through genuine forgetfulness. This seemed like the real achievement.

Driving away, back to Bergamo airport and the world of goat-track-free navigation, I caught myself already planning return coordinates. Same terrace, same fig tree, same bench that defeated our walking ambitions. Some holidays you remember for what you did. This one I will remember for what I did not do, and how surprisingly difficult, and then surprisingly easy, that turned out to be.