I have never been brilliant at reading maps, which is how I ended up driving our hire car down what I can only describe as a goat track somewhere between Arezzo and Bibbiena, convinced I was taking a scenic shortcut. The sat nav had given up on me some miles back. My partner sat in silence, gripping the door handle, as olive branches scraped the windows and a local farmer watched from his tractor with the kind of amused pity I have now come to expect from Italians who encounter British drivers in April.

We were visiting Tuscany in the spring, you see, lured by photographs of wildflowers and promises of mild weather before the summer crowds descended. What nobody had mentioned was that April in the Casentino valley means rain that arrives without warning, turning charming country lanes into something approaching a rally stage. I had packed linen shirts and sunglasses. I was wearing a borrowed anorak from the boot and had not seen the sun in two days.

The property sat on a hillside outside Bibbiena, a converted farmhouse with views that, when the clouds permitted, stretched across wooded valleys toward the Pratomagno mountains. We arrived as afternoon light was doing its best to break through, illuminating patches of forest in that particular spring manner where everything seems impossibly green, almost aggressive in its newness. The wet stone of the terrace glistened. Pots of lavender stood dripping by the door, not yet in bloom but already releasing their scent into the damp air.

Our host had left the key beneath a terracotta pot, which felt thrillingly illicit until I realised half the local wildlife probably knew this routine. Inside, the house smelled of woodsmoke and something herbal I later identified as dried rosemary hung in bundles from the kitchen beams. The heating had been left on, for which I was embarrassingly grateful. There is something about spring in Tuscany that photographs do not capture, a lingering chill that seeps into old stone walls and reminds you that winter has only recently loosened its grip.

I had imagined breakfast on the terrace, long evenings with local wine and the warm air of early summer. Instead we spent our first hours lighting the wood-burning stove and discovering that the property's charming original windows, while picturesque, permitted what I can only call a spirited draught. My partner found slippers in a cupboard, presumably left by previous guests who had made similar miscalculations about April weather. I put them on without shame.

The rain returned that evening, proper rain that hammered against the shutters and sent us early to bed with books we had not intended to read. Lying there listening to water rushing in gutters I had not previously noticed, I felt the particular foolishness of the British traveller who expects the Mediterranean to behave like a brochure. Spring in this corner of Tuscany is not a gentle transition. It is theatrical, unpredictable, demanding a certain humility from visitors who arrive with fixed ideas about their holiday.

Yet waking to mist rising from the valley floor the following morning, watching it slowly reveal the shapes of cypress trees and distant farm buildings, I understood something I had missed in my sun-seeking impatience. This season offers a different Tuscany, one of solitude and shifting light, of fires still necessary and landscapes caught between dormancy and growth. The wildflowers would come, our host assured us when she appeared with fresh eggs and gentle commentary on my driving route. But they were not yet ready, and neither, perhaps, were we.

I kept the slippers for the duration. The linen shirts stayed folded in my case, a reminder that travel rarely delivers what you pack for, and that the best journeys often arrive through wrong turns and lowered expectations.