I have never been so grateful to see a gravel driveway in all my life. After seven hours of driving from Turin airport, my partner and I finally crawled up the winding road to Aramengo, a tiny village in the Piedmont hills, only to discover I had been confidently navigating us to the wrong house for the last twenty minutes. The sat nav had given up somewhere near Asti, and I had taken this as a personal challenge rather than a warning. We pulled into a farmyard full of very confused-looking goats before a kind elderly gentleman pointed us back down the hill with gestures that needed no translation. My partner sat in stony silence. I laughed far too loudly to cover my embarrassment.

When we finally found the right place, tucked among hazelnut groves with the Alps faint and blue on the horizon, I practically fell out of the car and kissed the ground. The house was one of those solid stone affairs that looks like it has been growing out of the hillside for centuries, which in fairness it probably has. Terracotta pots of geraniums flanked the door. A cat that definitely did not belong to us wound between my legs and disappeared into the lavender. I decided this was an excellent omen.

The owner had left the key under a terracotta saucer, which felt thrillingly illicit, and inside we found cool stone floors, heavy wooden beams, and a kitchen that smelled faintly of rosemary and old wine. I immediately opened every shutter to let in the afternoon light, golden and thick as honey, and promptly broke the handle on the smallest window. My partner fixed it in approximately four seconds with a look I have learned to interpret over many years together. I poured us both a glass of local Barbera and declared that from this moment forward, we would be doing absolutely nothing.

And we kept that promise, more or less. The next morning I woke to church bells and birdsong and the distant putter of a tractor, which is frankly the most civilised alarm clock I have ever encountered. I made coffee in a stovetop pot and took it outside to a terrace warm enough for bare feet in October. There was a book I had been pretending to read since March. I opened it on page twelve and finished it by Tuesday.

The days settled into a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as rhythm at all. Breakfast stretched until eleven. We walked to the village shop for bread and cheese and whatever the owner recommended, which was always something wonderful wrapped in paper. The hills around Aramengo are soft and folded, covered in vineyards and woods, and we wandered them without purpose or map, finding nothing more dramatic than a crumbling chapel or a sudden view of the valley floor. Once we sat on a wall for an hour watching a farmer prune his vines, methodical and unhurried, and I found myself envying his patience. I am not a patient person. I check my phone during films. I read the last page of novels first. But something about that light, that air, made urgency feel faintly ridiculous.

Back at the house, afternoons dissolved into reading, dozing, and occasional competitive napping. I learned that my partner snores slightly differently on foreign soil. We ate dinner early by local standards, simple things from the market, drank too much Dolcetto, and went to bed when it got dark because what else was there to do? Nothing. Gloriously, deliberately, nothing at all.

On our last evening, I watched the sun drop behind the hills from that same terrace, wrapped in a blanket with my cold feet tucked under me, and felt something I rarely allow myself. Contentment without qualification. No plans, no achievements, no photographs that would impress anyone. Just the warmth fading from the stone, the last swallows overhead, and the certain knowledge that I would probably misplace the car keys in the morning. Some things, I have learned, do not need fixing.