I have never been so relieved to see a swimming pool in my entire life, and that includes the time I nearly drowned at Center Parcs as a teenager. The drive from Pisa airport to our villa near Arezzo had taken the best part of two hours, which Google Maps optimistically promised would be ninety minutes. Italian drivers, I have decided, treat the autostrada less like a motorway and more like a particularly competitive go-kart track.

The mishap came just outside Bucine, where I confidently turned left following a brown tourist sign for a castello, absolutely convinced it was a shortcut. It was not a shortcut. It was a gravel track that grew progressively narrower until I found myself wedged between two cypress trees, staring at a very unimpressed goat. My wife said nothing. She has this particular silence that speaks volumes. The children, meanwhile, thought it was the funniest thing they had seen since I accidentally sat on a gelato in Lucca two summers ago. Reversing back up that track in our hire car, with the goat now joined by what I can only describe as an audience of local wildlife, was not my finest hour.

By the time we finally spotted the villa, tucked among olive groves with Arezzo's medieval skyline visible in the distance, I was ready to abandon the car and walk. The owner, a cheerful chap called Marco who spoke roughly six words of English to my twelve words of Italian, handed us a key and gestured vaguely towards a wooden gate. And there it was: the pool, glinting in the late afternoon sun, looking like something from a travel brochure I would normally dismiss as unrealistic.

The villa itself was exactly the sort of place you hope for but rarely get. Slightly rambling, comfortably worn around the edges, with terracotta floors that stayed deliciously cool underfoot and shutters that creaked in a satisfying, well-loved way. The kitchen had one of those enormous farmhouse tables where everything happens at once: breakfast preparations, card games, the inevitable hunt for a phone charger. My daughter immediately claimed the bedroom with the wrought-iron balcony overlooking the garden, on the grounds that she had called it first. My son simply disappeared into the pool and reappeared two hours later looking like a prune.

What struck me most, once I had stopped sweating from the drive and the goat incident, was the particular quality of the light. Everything looked slightly golden, even the washing-up liquid by the sink. The garden was full of lavender and rosemary, that classic Tuscan combination that makes you feel you have wandered into someone else's rather more elegant life. Marco had left us a bottle of local wine and some pecorino, which we demolished on the terrace while the children finally stopped bickering and started actually talking to each other.

I think the thing about a cottage-style holiday, as opposed to the hotel breaks we usually default to, is the gentle surrender of control. Nobody brings you fresh towels. You have to figure out the slightly temperamental coffee pot yourself. The oven runs hot, as I discovered when I incinerated our first attempt at a supermarket pizza. But there is something deeply satisfying about making a space your own, even temporarily. By evening, we had established our routines: morning swim, slow breakfast, lazy discussion about whether today was the day we would actually visit Arezzo proper or just read books by the pool again.

Spoiler: we mostly chose the pool. And honestly, after that drive, I think we earned it.