I have never been so grateful for a cup of tea in my entire life. After eight hours of driving from Ancona Airport, complete with a sat-nav that appeared to have developed a personal vendetta against me, we finally crawled up the gravel track to our Morrovalle farmhouse. I was ready to weep with relief. Then I opened the car door, stepped straight into a drainage ditch I had not spotted in the dusk, and spent the first ten minutes of our holiday standing in one sodden shoe, trying to look dignified while my children howled with laughter from the terrace above.

The place itself, though, made up for every indignity. It was one of those solid old stone buildings that seem to grow out of the Marche hills rather than sit upon them. Warm light spilled from the kitchen window, and someone, presumably the owner who had popped by earlier, had left a bottle of Verdicchio on the table with a handwritten note wishing us well. I hobbled inside, abandoned my ruined shoe by the door, and promptly forgot about it.

The kitchen had that particular smell of old wood and dried herbs that you cannot fake. Beamed ceiling, slightly uneven terracotta floors, a fireplace big enough to stand in. My wife immediately claimed the worn wooden chair by the window for her morning coffee spot. The children disappeared upstairs to argue over who got which bedroom, returning ten minutes later having formed an unexpected alliance against the room with the creaky floorboard. Fair enough. I had creaky floorboards enough in my knees after that drive.

What struck me most, once I had stopped dripping, was the quiet. Not silence exactly. There were crickets, distant dogs, the occasional tractor somewhere across the valley. But no traffic hum, no neighbour's television bleeding through walls. Just space and the soft Marche darkness, which feels different somehow, thicker and more settled than at home.

We unpacked badly, as families do, leaving bags half-open in corridors and making hopeful piles of things we would never find again. I attempted a barbecue with the built-in stone grill in the garden, using local sausages I had grabbed from a village shop whose owner spoke no English and patiently tolerated my pointing. The sausages were magnificent. My fire management less so. There is a particular humility to standing before a smoking pile of charcoal while your family politely waits, pretending not to notice that you have no idea what you are doing.

By the second evening, though, I had the measure of it. We ate outside at the long table, watching the light change over the hills, passing bread and olive oil and stories from the day. The children had discovered the pool, naturally, and spent most of their time developing elaborate diving competitions that involved more shouting than actual diving. My wife read her book and occasionally looked up to make sure nobody was drowning. I did the same with my beer.

I kept finding myself just standing there, doing nothing in particular. Leaning on the terrace wall with my morning coffee, watching mist lift from the valley below. It is an odd thing to recognise how rarely you stop moving at home, how constantly you fill time with tasks and scrolling and noise. Here, the place demanded nothing. The hills did not care about my productivity. The crickets kept their own schedule.

We did venture to Morrovalle itself one morning, a proper working town rather than a tourist confection, which suited us perfectly. A coffee at the bar, a wander past the sandstone buildings, the children baffled and delighted by a shop that sold nothing but buttons. We bought bread and tomatoes and more of that excellent olive oil, then retreated to our hillside before the afternoon heat built.

That first night, the ditch and the ruined shoe, now feel like the necessary price of admission. You cannot arrive somewhere properly without a small humiliation, I have decided. It clears the decks, reminds you that you are not in charge here. I left the shoe by the door for three days as a sort of trophy, until my wife quietly binned it. The Verdicchio lasted slightly longer. The memory of that first evening, standing in the kitchen with wet socks and a full glass, laughing at myself properly for the first time in months, will last considerably longer than either.