I should have known the sat nav was plotting against me the moment it sent us down a track barely wide enough for a Vespa. There we were, my partner and I, bumping along what I stubbornly insisted was a "scenic route" while she waved her phone about like a dowsing rod, muttering that we were definitely in the wrong bit of Le Marche. The olive groves looked identical. Every farmhouse looked identical. I had that sinking feeling you get when you realise your confident "I know where I'm going" has just cost you forty minutes and most of your dignity.

We were aiming for a place near Recanati, arriving in late October when the whole region has that lovely exhausted feeling, like a hostess after a good party. The summer crowds have gone home. The grape harvest is mostly done, though you still catch the odd tractor wobbling along with its load. The air smells of woodsmoke and damp earth and something else I couldn't place until later - rotting apples, maybe, or just the general decay of autumn doing its thing.

When we finally found the right turning, the light was already going that particular Novemberish grey, though it was only half past four. That's the thing about this time of year in central Italy; the days feel borrowed, stolen from somewhere further south. The property sat among leaf-stripped vines, the pool covered over with one of those sad tarpaulins that always look like a body dump in crime dramas. My partner said this. I told her to stop watching so much Nordic noir.

The key was in one of those little lockboxes that always make me feel like I'm breaking in. I fumbled it in the gloom, fingers stiff from the car's air conditioning, which I'd stubbornly kept on despite the outside temperature dropping. The door opened onto that particular smell of Italian holiday lets in autumn - slightly damp plaster, last summer's mosquito coils, the ghost of a thousand previous barbecues. I loved it instantly.

We dumped our bags and I made straight for the terrace, because I'd spotted a wood-fired oven and had ambitions. The previous guests had left a half-empty bag of charcoal and some suspiciously damp kindling. I spent twenty minutes failing to light it while my partner explored inside, reporting back on the boiler situation with the enthusiasm of someone who'd just discovered reliable hot water. In October, this matters. In August, you don't care. In October, a good boiler is basically a personality trait.

The darkness came down properly then, not like the slow English fade but properly, theatrically, as if someone had drawn a curtain. The lights of Recanati proper twinkled from somewhere below, though "twinkled" is probably generous; it was more of a general orange glow against the hills. We could hear dogs barking, distant and then suddenly close, then distant again, that strange acoustic trick the countryside plays.

We ended up eating cheese and bread inside, my oven ambitions abandoned, watching condensation form on the windows. The heating ticked and groaned, finding its rhythm. Somewhere a clock struck, though I'd later discover there was no clock, just a neighbour's church doing its thing across the valley.

I sat there with wine that tasted properly of something, because we'd stopped at a proper enoteca rather than a supermarket, and I felt that particular autumn feeling - the melancholy that isn't quite sadness, the sense of something ending rather than beginning. Summer properties in October are like that. They're waiting. The owners have probably gone back to Ancona or wherever, leaving the place to its own devices, trusting the occasional guest to keep it alive.

My partner fell asleep on the sofa, book abandoned. I stayed up, listening to the heating and the dogs and something else - maybe an owl, probably a pigeon, I'm rubbish at birds. The darkness outside felt absolute, the kind of dark you forget exists when you live in towns.

I thought about the journey, the wrong turn, my stubbornness. I thought about how I'd insisted on this particular week because it was cheaper, because I had this romantic notion of "out of season" Italy. The pool was covered. The oven was damp. The days would be short and probably rainy.

I finished my wine. The heating ticked. Somewhere, Recanati slept, and we were here, briefly, in this borrowed house in this borrowed season, getting something wrong and something right in approximately equal measure.