The SatNav gave up on us somewhere between Asti and nowhere, which is how I found myself wedged down a single-track lane, reversing 200 metres past a vineyard while an elderly gentleman in a Fiat Panda watched with the patient amusement of someone who has seen this a hundred times before. I had insisted I could navigate the final stretch from memory. I could not. My wife said nothing. She did not need to.

We were bound for a place called Monferrato, a farmhouse rental tucked into the hills of Piedmont, and after forty minutes of increasingly theatrical gestures between myself and a local farmer who spoke exclusively in dialect, we finally spotted the stone walls and terracotta roof peeking through the cypress trees. The sun was doing that golden late-afternoon thing that makes everything look like a film set, and I decided to pretend the whole reversing incident had been character-building.

The owners, a couple called Marco and Luisa, emerged from an outbuilding smelling faintly of wine and woodsmoke. They spoke better English than my Italian, which is to say they knew the word for "welcome" and I knew the word for "beer," and between us we established that I was an idiot but a well-meaning one. Luisa handed us a bottle of their own Barbera, which I clutched like a trophy, and Marco showed us around the property with the quiet pride of someone who has spent years coaxing beauty from old stone.

The house itself was exactly the sort of place that makes you reconsider your life choices. Thick walls, wooden beams dark with age, a kitchen that managed to be both rustic and properly equipped. My children immediately claimed the twin bedroom upstairs, leaving my wife and me with a four-poster that creaked authentically and a view across rolling hills that looked almost suspiciously perfect. I kept expecting to spot a film crew.

What struck me first was the silence. Not the uncomfortable kind, but the deep, settling quiet of a place where traffic is something that happens to other people. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked, then thought better of it. The pool sat at the edge of the garden, blue and inviting, bordered by lavender that hummed with bees. My youngest stood at the edge and announced she would live here forever, which seemed a reasonable position.

That first evening we did nothing ambitious. Marco had left us bread, local salami, and tomatoes that actually tasted of something. We sat on the terrace with the Barbera, watching the light change over the vineyards, and I found myself confessing to my wife that I could not remember the last time I had sat still for this long without checking my phone. She raised an eyebrow. I checked my phone. It had no signal. This was, I realised, entirely the point.

The children eventually fell asleep across the outdoor sofa, wine-stained and mosquito-bitten and utterly content. I carried them inside one by one, their warm weight familiar and fleeting, and caught myself thinking how rarely I do this at home, how the ordinary magic of a holiday is mostly just paying proper attention to things I normally rush past.

We had two weeks ahead of us, filled presumably with pasta and pool time and small adventures in nearby villages. But that first night, still slightly dusty from the road and faintly embarrassed by my navigational failure, I felt something shift and settle. The SatNav had not been wrong, exactly. It had simply given up before the journey was truly finished.