The Sat Nav had other ideas about how to reach our holiday let in Comunanza. Instead of guiding us through the sensible route from Ancona, it sent us up what I can only describe as a goat track masquerading as a road, complete with a tractor that appeared to have been abandoned sometime in the late seventies. My partner, who had insisted on doing the driving, gripped the wheel with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb. I gripped the door handle. The children in the back had gone suspiciously quiet, which any parent knows is far more alarming than complaining.

We crested a hill and there it was: a handsome stone farmhouse with views that made me forget entirely about the twenty minutes of terror. The owner, a wiry chap called Franco who spoke exactly eleven words of English, greeted us with a bottle of his own wine and what I initially thought was a friendly gesture but later realised was him pointing out that I had parked squarely in his vegetable patch. In my defence, the aubergines were not clearly marked.

The property itself was everything the photos promised and then some. Thick walls that kept the heat at bay, terracotta floors that felt deliciously cool under bare feet, and a covered terrace where I immediately decided I would be spending approximately ninety percent of my waking hours. Franco showed us round with the brisk efficiency of a man who had done this a thousand times, though he did pause to tut disapprovingly at my parking job one more time before leaving us to it.

I will confess something here. I am not good at doing nothing. My normal existence involves checking emails while making tea while mentally compiling tomorrow's to-do list. The concept of genuine idleness terrifies me slightly, like a foreign language I never learned. But Marche, I discovered, is an excellent teacher.

Our first morning, I woke with the unfamiliar sensation of having slept through the night without once wondering about work. The children were already outside, chasing lizards between the olive trees with the kind of purposeless energy that childhood does so well. I made coffee in the basic but perfectly adequate kitchen, carried it to the terrace, and sat. Just sat. The valley below was doing something magical with mist and early light, and somewhere a cockerel was making its opinions known. I finished my coffee and did not immediately leap up to be productive. This felt, I cannot lie, faintly revolutionary.

The days that followed settled into a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as rhythm at all. Breakfast on the terrace with bread from the bakery in Comunanza village, a ten-minute wander down the lane. The children would disappear to the pool, that glorious turquoise rectangle where they invented increasingly pointless diving competitions. I would read, or attempt to read, though I found myself spending more time watching a particular swallow who had mistaken the terrace rafters for desirable real estate.

We did venture out, of course, but never far and never with urgency. The village itself rewarded lazy exploration: a proper butcher who still hand-cuts his meat, a bar where the coffee costs roughly what you'd pay for the cup alone back home, elderly chaps in the piazza who seem to have been sitting in precisely those positions since the war. We walked the marked trail that loops through nearby woodland, though we abandoned it halfway when the youngest declared her legs had stopped working, and retreated to the terrace for more reading and the occasional snooze.

One afternoon I found myself genuinely uncertain what day it was. Not in a panicked, missed-a-meeting way. In a soft, pleasant drift that felt like the mental equivalent of floating. I did not check my phone to find out. This, I think, was the moment I understood what the holiday was actually for.

The wine helped, obviously. Franco's rough red, drunk as the sun dropped behind the hills and the swallows went absolutely berserk in their evening feeding frenzy. Simple meals assembled from whatever looked good at the village shops: pecorino that tasted of actual sheep, tomatoes with flavour, that sort of thing. We ate late, as one must, and talked nonsense, and watched the stars appear with the theatrical slowness they reserve for places without light pollution.

I am back now, of course. The to-do lists have reasserted themselves. But something of that terrace idleness has stayed with me, a small quiet room in my head I can step into when the world gets too loud. I think of Franco, probably still tutting at other people's parking. I think of that swallow, who may or may not have sealed the property deal. Mostly I think of doing very little, very slowly, in very good sunshine, and how I cannot wait to be so thoroughly useless again.