I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked suspiciously like someone's olive grove. There I was, winding through the Marchigiani hills in late October, convinced I was about to star in a very low-budget Italian farce. The autumn light had turned everything golden, which was lovely, but the roads had narrowed to something a goat would hesitate on, and my hire car was making noises I had never heard before.

The mishap came at a bend near Tolentino, where I spotted what I thought was a shortcut. It was not a shortcut. It was a farm track, currently occupied by a gentleman in a Fiat Panda who was gesturing with the kind of expressive despair that only Italians can truly master. We performed a twenty-point turn together, surrounded by chestnut trees dropping their leaves like confetti, while he explained in rapid Italian that I had missed the proper road by approximately half a mile. I understood roughly every third word, smiled apologetically, and reversed into a puddle that was deeper than it looked. My left shoe did not recover until Thursday.

By the time I found the property, the afternoon had softened into that particular amber glow you only get in Marche during autumn. The place sat among rolling hills, a converted farmhouse with weathered stone walls and shutters that had clearly seen a few decades of seasons come and go. The air smelled of woodsmoke and damp earth, that rich, mushroomy scent that follows the first proper rains. I stepped out of the car and immediately felt the temperature drop as the sun slipped behind the mountains. October here is not messing about. It gives you glorious days, yes, but the evenings arrive with a brisk reminder that winter is sorting out its paperwork.

The owner, a wiry chap called Franco, emerged wearing a jacket that had seen better days and a expression of mild amusement at my mud-splattered vehicle. He showed me round with the unhurried pace of someone who knows that autumn in the countryside operates on its own timetable. The pool was covered now, he explained, the season having turned in late September. I felt a brief pang, but then he opened the door to the kitchen and the smell of the wood-burning stove hit me, and suddenly a dip in chilly water seemed vastly less appealing than the prospect of sitting by that fire with a glass of something local.

The rooms felt different than they would in summer, I could tell. The thick walls held the day's warmth but the terracotta tiles were cool underfoot, and the bed had that weighty duvet that makes you feel properly tucked in against the dark. Franco had left a basket of late-season produce on the table - walnuts, a knobbly pear, some of those small apples that taste properly of something. I ate the pear standing at the window, watching the last light fade and the first bats come out to hunt. The countryside in autumn feels busier somehow, more urgent. The harvest is in, the hunting season has started, and there is a sense of things being gathered in before the real cold arrives.

That evening I walked down to Tolentino itself, barely ten minutes, and found the town wrapped in its autumn evening routine. The bars were doing a steady trade in caffe corretti, that shot of grappa in espresso that makes perfect sense when the temperature has dropped. I ate somewhere simple, nothing fancy, just pasta with a wild boar ragu that tasted of the woods I had driven through, and drank a glass of Rosso Conero that seemed to have been waiting for exactly this kind of night.

Walking back up the hill afterwards, the stars were doing that brilliant, unsullied thing they do when you are away from city lights. The air had turned properly cold now, carrying the promise of frost. I could see my breath, and I thought about how different this all would be in July, when the hills would be baked brown and the evenings would hum with cicadas and the pool would be the centre of everything. This version, the autumn one, felt more private somehow, more earned. You had to want it a bit more, had to accept the trade-offs. No swimming, no long lazy evenings outside, but instead that particular pleasure of coming in from the cold to warmth and quiet and the smell of woodsmoke in your clothes.

I thought too about my sat nav incompetence, my ruined shoe, my general unsuitability for navigating rural Italy. But standing there in the dark, with the town lights below and the mountains invisible against the sky, it seemed like the right kind of foolishness for the season. Autumn in Marche does not hand itself to you on a plate. It makes you work a little, navigate a few wrong turns, get your feet wet. The reward, though, that first impression of arrival when the cold air hits and the fire is waiting and the year is winding down to something slower and more thoughtful - that feels like something worth a bit of mild humiliation. I went inside, put another log on, and decided I would worry about my driving in the morning.