I have never been so grateful for a functioning kettle in my entire life. After a twelve-hour journey involving a delayed flight to Ancona, a hire car with suspiciously vague fuel markings, and my own spectacular misreading of a sat nav instruction that sent me up a goat track rather than the main road to Macerata, I finally stumbled through the door of our holiday let in late October. I had managed to pack everything except proper teabags, which I discovered three hours into the drive, and had been surviving on petrol station coffee that tasted of regret and burnt rubber.

The first thing that struck me was the smell. Not the musty, closed-up scent I had braced myself for after months of seasonal disuse, but something greener and more alive. The owners had left the shutters open, and the autumn air had been moving through the place all afternoon, carrying with it the particular damp-earth perfume of the Marche countryside after a warm day. It was that odd in-between weather, you see, the kind that cannot quite decide if summer has finished or if it is merely having a breather before the proper cold sets in.

I dumped my bags in what I hoped was the main bedroom, made that essential cup of tea with bags I found in the back of a cupboard, and stepped onto the terrace. The pool had been covered for weeks, its winter blanket sagging slightly with collected rain, and the garden furniture was stacked with the apologetic look of things put away until next year. But the view, oh, the view. Rolling hills fading from green to bronze, the last of the grape harvest hanging heavy on vines in the valley below, and everywhere that particular quality of autumn light that makes everything look slightly more meaningful than it actually is.

I had chosen October partly for cheapness, partly for cowardice, having endured a July holiday in Tuscany some years back that felt like being trapped inside a hairdryer. The Marche in autumn, I had read, was Italy without the performance of it. No posing by pools, no desperate restaurant bookings, just the region getting on with the business of being itself. What I had not fully anticipated was how this seasonal quiet would reshape the whole rhythm of the place.

The house itself seemed to breathe differently than it would in high season. The thick stone walls, which I imagine become a blessed refuge in August, now held a faint chill that no amount of afternoon sun quite dispelled. I found myself wearing layers indoors, moving from terrace to kitchen to sitting room following the sun's path like a cat. The owners had left the heating off, reasonably enough, and I spent my first evening in two jumpers and a blanket, feeling faintly ridiculous but also rather pleased with my own hardiness.

Morning brought the full strangeness of the season. I woke to fog so thick I could not see the edge of the terrace, the hills vanished entirely, and for a disorienting moment I wondered if my sat nav incompetence had somehow landed me in the Peak District by mistake. But then the sun burned through, rapidly and completely, and by ten the world was revealed again in that sharp, clear light that autumn alone produces. I understood then why the owners had recommended this time of year for walking, though I noted they had made this recommendation from the comfort of their own centrally heated home in Macerata town.

The local shop, when I eventually found it open, was selling the last of the summer tomatoes alongside the first of the new olive oil, and the woman behind the counter seemed mildly amused by my enthusiasm for both. Everything operated on reduced hours now, the seasonal shrug of a place that knows its main audience has gone home. I rather liked it, this sense of catching somewhere off-duty, though I did spend one hungry evening discovering that the restaurant I had planned to visit was closed until spring.

By my third day, I had settled into the house's autumn personality. I learned which chairs caught the morning sun, when to open windows to air the place without losing all warmth, and the particular pleasure of a hot shower after a chilly walk through vineyards where the leaves were turning in earnest. The covered pool became a sort of melancholy sculpture in the garden, a reminder of a different kind of holiday that this was not, and I found I did not mind.

What I had expected to be a compromise, this off-season timing, became instead the defining quality of the stay. The house was not trying to be anything other than what it was in October: slightly draughty, occasionally inconvenient, but genuinely peaceful in a way that summer rentals rarely achieve. I left with olive oil on my clothes, a slight cold, and the certain knowledge that I would return at exactly the same time of year, having finally understood that the season was not the background to the holiday but the whole point of it.