I'll never forget the moment we realised our sat nav had developed a sense of humour. Somewhere between Ancona airport and the rolling hills of Marche, it decided the fastest route to Montefiore Dell'aso involved a dirt track that looked like it hadn't seen a Fiat since the seventies. There we were, two children in the back asking if we were nearly there yet for the forty-seventh time, my wife clutching a bag of slightly melted airport croissants, and me pretending I knew exactly where we were going. The track got narrower. The olive trees got closer. Then, with perfect comic timing, the undercarriage scraped something that sounded expensive, and we emerged into a farmyard where a very old man and his dog looked at us with identical expressions of mild confusion. I wound down the window, attempted my best "dove e Montefiore Dell'aso," and he simply pointed back the way we'd come. We had, in my defence, been within three hundred metres of the place for a full twenty minutes.

The proper approach, as we discovered on our second attempt, is far more dignified. A winding lane through vineyards, the kind that makes you slow down without meaning to, just to look. And then there it was, perched on its hillside with views that made the whole crooked journey worthwhile. Our holiday home sat among a cluster of restored farm buildings, honey-coloured stone catching the afternoon light, with a pool glinting below like someone had dropped a mirror in the grass. The children were out of the car before I'd even found the handbrake, already arguing about who got which bedroom.

Inside, the place had that particular smell of old stone and new plaster that I've come to associate with proper Italian country stays. Not fancy, not trying too hard, just comfortable in its own skin. Terracotta floors that stayed cool underfoot, wooden beams that had witnessed several centuries of local history, a kitchen that immediately suggested long lunches and slightly too much wine. My wife opened the shutters in the main bedroom and actually gasped. I assumed she'd seen a spider, but no, it was the view across the valley to the Sibillini mountains, hazy blue in the distance, with Montefiore's own medieval tower visible on the ridge above us. I joined her, and we stood there like a pair of idiots, grinning at each other with that particular relief that comes when a holiday choice actually pays off.

The children had already discovered the pool, of course, and were conducting some kind of shrieking competition that echoed off the surrounding hills. I unpacked the car in stages, each trip taking longer as I found myself pausing to watch a hawk circling, or to listen to the absolute silence that fell between the distant shouts of my offspring. A neighbour's cat appeared from nowhere, assessed me with the contempt only cats can manage, and disappeared into the lavender.

That first evening, we walked the few minutes into Montefiore Dell'aso itself, slightly sun-drunk and hungry in that hollow way that swimming always leaves you. The village is small, properly small, the kind where the baker knows the butcher and both of them seem to be related to the woman running the tiny bar where we ordered pizzas and cold beer. The children ran ahead to investigate a playground that looked like it had been built in someone's better judgement during the 1980s, all metal and concrete and utterly thrilling to anyone under twelve. We sat at a plastic table, watched the local lads circle on scooters with the solemn purpose of teenagers everywhere, and felt something unknot in our chests that we hadn't realised was tight.

I won't pretend the first night was perfect. The sofa bed in the living room turned out to have a spring with a personal vendetta against my lower back. Someone, possibly me, had forgotten to pack proper coffee, and the morning revealed that Italian supermarkets operate on hours that seemed designed to catch out the optimistic British tourist. But I woke to church bells and birdsong, made terrible instant coffee that I drank on the terrace watching mist lift from the valley, and felt genuinely happy in that uncomplicated way that family holidays sometimes manage, when you stop trying to make everything special and just let it be what it is.

We had two weeks of this ahead of us. Swimming, walking, eating things we'd bought from actual farms, arguing over card games in the evening cool. Nothing ambitious. Nothing that would make a proper travel story. Just the four of us in a stone house on a hill, getting slightly brown and slightly lazy and slightly better at being together without the usual distractions. I thought about that wrong turn on the first day, the old man and his dog, the ridiculousness of me pretending to be in control of anything. Sometimes the wrong road gets you exactly where you needed to be.