I have never been so grateful for a sat nav's patience as I was driving to Montefiore Dell'aso this past October. There I was, winding through the Marche countryside, utterly convinced I had discovered a shortcut that Google Maps had cruelly hidden from me. The shortcut turned out to be a farm track, two mildly alarmed sheep, and a very real possibility that I would be explaining my life choices to a bemused Italian farmer. I reversed for nearly a mile. The sat nav, in what I can only describe as a tone of digital disappointment, kept recalculating. I arrived at the villa with clutch leg and dignity both in need of serious recovery.

October in Marche is something else entirely. The summer crowds have melted away like the last gelato of August, and what remains is this extraordinary, golden quiet. The property sits near Montefiore Dell'aso, a village that clings to a hilltop with the kind of stubborn charm you find all through this part of Italy. I stepped out of the car and the air hit me immediately - that particular autumn coolness that carries woodsmoke and something else, something I eventually identified as ripe olives waiting for the harvest. The pool, still technically open, looked at me with what I can only describe as seasonal scepticism. I dipped a toe. The toe withdrew. We agreed to reconvene in warmer circumstances.

The villa itself is one of those solid, unhurried stone buildings that seem to have grown from the hillside rather than been built upon it. In October the light comes sideways through the windows, casting long rectangles across terracotta floors that hold the day's warmth just long enough for evening. I spent my first hour simply moving between rooms, watching how the lowering sun transformed each space. The kitchen, east-facing, had already lost its morning brightness and felt almost monastic, cool and shadowed. The living room, facing west, was still gathering the afternoon, warm as a cat in a sunbeam. I understood then that autumn here is not merely a temperature but a daily migration of comfort, and that my holiday would be spent following the light like some middle-aged sundial.

I had planned ambitious excursions, naturally. The Adriatic coast is not far, and there are hill towns enough to fill a fortnight. But October had other ideas. The shorter days seemed to compress my ambitions without my quite noticing. I would wake to mist pooled in the valley below, make coffee, and by the time I had properly considered my plans the morning had softened into something too pleasant to interrupt with purpose. The village of Montefiore Dell'aso itself, barely a stroll away, provided sufficient occupation. There is a bakery where the owner, sensing my pathetic attempts at Italian, simply began selecting things for me. I never knew what I was eating. I always wanted more.

The evenings brought their own seasonal character. Darkness fell with what felt like deliberate speed, not the lingering twilight of summer but a decisive drawing of curtains. I found myself cooking earlier, eating earlier, sleeping earlier, falling into rhythms that felt borrowed from some previous century. One night I attempted to use the outdoor terrace for dinner. The candles guttered. A sweater proved insufficient. I retreated indoors with my pasta and my pride, though not before noticing how extraordinary the stars had become without summer's humidity to blur them.

There is something particular about visiting a place designed for summer abundance when that abundance has passed. The property's gardens were still producing, tomatoes hanging on determined vines, herbs growing woody and intense in the cooler air. I made sauces that tasted concentrated, almost fierce, as if the plants knew their time was limited and had put everything remaining into flavour. The local wine, a Rosso Conero I bought from a co-operative down the road, seemed to have absorbed something of the same urgency, darker and more serious than I remembered from previous Italian holidays.

By my final days I had abandoned nearly all my planned excursions. I walked the immediate countryside instead, through olive groves where nets were being laid for the coming harvest, past vineyards where the leaves had turned that impossible colour between red and gold that seems to exist only in October. The locals I encountered seemed to understand my aimlessness. They were in seasonal transition themselves, finishing one kind of labour, preparing for another, neither fully here nor there.

I left on a morning when the valley was entirely lost to mist, the village above me floating like a ship I was slowly sailing away from. The sat nav found the proper road without commentary. I did not attempt shortcuts. Some lessons, it seems, are seasonal in their learning.