The sat nav had been insisting we were nearly there for a good twenty minutes, which in Sicilian terms apparently means "keep driving until your palms sweat." My partner, Dave, was doing his best impression of a calm and collected holiday driver, but I could see his knuckles whitening on the steering wheel as we crawled up yet another dusty lane flanked by dry stone walls and the occasional goat giving us a look of profound judgment.

That was when I spotted it. A sign for Noto, finally, and what looked like our turn. "Left here," I said, with the confidence of someone who had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. Dave, bless him, listened. We bounced down a track that grew narrower and more apologetic by the metre, until we found ourselves in what I can only describe as someone's very private olive grove, complete with a furious little dog and a farmer who emerged from nowhere looking like he had been waiting his entire life for this exact moment. I wound down the window and attempted my best "scusi," which came out sounding more like a sneeze. The farmer, mercifully, found this hilarious rather than offensive, and pointed us back the way we'd come with a gesture that managed to be both helpful and deeply pitying.

Fifteen minutes later, properly chastened and considerably dustier, we actually arrived. The property sat nestled among more of those ancient dry stone walls, with a terrace that seemed to spill out towards the Iblean hills in the most gloriously casual way. I stepped out of the car and immediately felt the sort of warmth that makes you understand why Sicilians have perfected the art of moving slowly. It was not the aggressive heat of high summer but something softer, more inviting, like being wrapped in a well-worn blanket that happens to have been left in the sun.

The first thing I did, because I am apparently incapable of being a sophisticated traveller, was make a beeline for the pool. It was one of those proper little plunge pools, nothing grand, but positioned so you could float about with your eyes closed and pretend you were the only person for miles. I did exactly this for the better part of an hour, occasionally opening one eye to watch Dave attempting to unpack with the methodical urgency of a man who cannot relax until every sock has a designated drawer.

We had not come to Noto to tick off sights or chase experiences. That much became clear as the afternoon stretched into evening and we found ourselves still on that terrace, sharing a bottle of Nero d'Avola we'd picked up from a tiny enoteca in town, watching the light turn everything golden and then pink and then finally that deep blue that makes you forget to check your phone. The town itself, when we eventually wandered down the next morning, revealed itself in fragments. A baroque facade here, a narrow street smelling of baking bread there, the occasional grand cathedral appearing around a corner like a pleasant surprise you had not scheduled.

I had brought three books and finished none of them, which I consider a mark of tremendous success. There is a particular pleasure in reading the same paragraph four times because you keep looking up at a cloud, or a lizard, or simply the satisfying nothingness of a warm afternoon. We walked to the local shop for provisions most days, developing what I pretended was a routine but was really just an excuse to buy more of the ricotta that tasted nothing like the sad tubs back home.

By the end of the week, I had become the sort of person who judges the quality of a day by how little happened in it. The mishap in the olive grove became our opening anecdote, told with increasing embellishment. The farmer's dog, in my retelling, grew larger and more theatrical. Dave would catch my eye and shake his head, but he was smiling.

We left with sand in our shoes, half a bottle of olive oil wrapped in a t-shirt, and the certain knowledge that we had done nothing remarkable whatsoever, which was, of course, the entire point.