I should have known the sat-nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through someone's vineyard. There I was, after six hours of driving from Turin airport, white-knuckling it down yet another narrow lane between rows of Nebbiolo grapes, convinced I was about to become the first person ever to get a parking ticket in a field. The little voice kept insisting I had arrived. I had most certainly not arrived. I had arrived at a very picturesque dead end, and a very unimpressed-looking dog.

Turning round in a space roughly the size of a dinner plate took three attempts and what dignity I had left. The Barolo Langhe property was supposedly in La Morra, which I now understood meant "somewhere up there" in the general direction of heaven. The hills of Piedmont do not believe in flat. They believe in dramatic.

When I finally found the actual entrance, I nearly missed it entirely. A discreet wooden gate, some rather lovely stone walls, and that particular hush that comes from being surrounded by nothing but vines and the occasional distant church bell. I stepped out of the car and promptly discovered my left shoe had somehow acquired a companion: a squashed bit of focaccia from a service station stop two hours prior. There is no elegant way to remove food from your own footwear while pretending you meant to do that. I hopped about like a middle-aged flamingo and gave up, scraping it against the wall with what I hoped looked like casual nonchalance.

The property itself was one of those converted stone farmhouses that make you immediately regret every life choice that did not involve moving to Italy twenty years earlier. Terracotta roof, wooden shutters, the faint smell of woodsmoke from somewhere nearby. My host appeared - a woman called Elena who spoke better English than I do and seemed entirely unbothered by my focaccia situation. She showed me through to a kitchen that actually made me laugh out loud. Not at it, but with the sheer relief of it. Proper coffee machine. A table big enough for actual humans. Windows that looked out onto those ridiculous rolling hills, all misty and golden in the late afternoon light, as if Piedmont had hired a particularly keen set designer.

I dumped my bags with the subtlety of a falling wardrobe and went straight for the terrace. The property sits in the heart of Barolo country, and someone had clearly understood the assignment. There was a table, chairs, and a view that made me feel slightly emotional in a way I was not prepared for. I had spent the entire journey wound tight, cursing Italian road signage and my own refusal to pay for sat-nav updates. Now, with a glass of something local and red in my hand - Elena had left a bottle, because apparently she understood exactly what sort of day I had endured - I felt the particular click of a place slotting into exactly where it should be.

The evening brought the kind of quiet I had forgotten existed. No traffic, just the occasional rustle of something small in the vines and the distant clatter of a neighbour's dinner preparations. I cooked badly with local ingredients from a shop in nearby Alba, made worse by my insistence that I could absolutely identify which pasta shape was correct without reading the packet. I could not. It did not matter. I sat on that terrace until the light went completely, watching the hills turn from gold to grey to something approaching purple, and thought about how often I rush through arrivals, desperate to be doing, and how rarely I simply let myself be somewhere.

The focaccia incident, I decided, had been worth it.