The satnav had been insisting for the last twenty minutes that we were "arriving at destination," which would have been reassuring had we not been bumping down what I can only describe as a glorified goat track, my partner gripping the door handle with the enthusiasm of someone on a fairground ride they did not sign up for. I had been so proud of booking our Bibbiena villa through a proper holiday lettings site, picturing myself as the sort of person who effortlessly finds charming rural properties. The reality, as the Fiat Punto scraped its underside for the third time, was somewhat less glamorous.

We rounded a bend and there it was, perched on a hillside with views that made me immediately forgive every rock and rut. Stone walls the colour of honey, shutters in that particular faded green you only seem to find in Tuscany, and a terrace that practically demanded a spritz and a complete absence of ambition. I turned off the engine with theatrical triumph. The keys, naturally, were not in the agreed hiding place. Twenty minutes of increasingly undignified searching later, involving me crawling around a rosemary bush and my partner muttering about "the reviews never mentioning this," we discovered them inside a terracotta pot so obvious it felt personally insulting.

The door swung open onto cool tile floors and that particular stillness of a house that has been waiting in sunshine. I will confess that my first act was not cultural appreciation but the locating of the fridge, where I found a welcome bottle of local wine that I suspect the owners leave for all guests but which I chose to interpret as recognition of my specifically deserving nature. We carried glasses to the terrace and simply stopped. The Valdarno stretched below, patchwork fields and cypress fingers pointing skyward, and somewhere a dog barked with the lazy irregularity of an animal with no particular agenda.

That first afternoon set the pattern for days that followed. We rose without alarms, which anyone who knows my usual relationship with the snooze button will understand as genuinely radical. Breakfast became a two-hour affair of coffee going cold, bread from the bakery in Bibbiena town, and tomatoes that actually tasted of something. I had brought three books and finished none of them, which I consider the truest measure of relaxation. There is a particular pleasure in reading the same paragraph four times because a lizard on the wall has caught your attention, or because you have simply drifted into a thought about nothing very much.

We did venture out, though I use "venture" generously. The town of Bibbiena itself, barely ten minutes away, provided morning coffee and evening passeggiata, that lovely Italian ritual of strolling about looking at things and people looking at you looking at things. We found a trattoria where the owner waved away menus and brought what he felt like, which turned out to be pici with wild boar ragu that I still think about with inappropriate frequency. The local market, on Thursday mornings, supplied pecorino and honey and conversations I mostly understood through gesture and goodwill.

There was a moment, perhaps day four, when I caught myself feeling vaguely guilty about our lack of itinerary. No Florence, no Siena, no cultural box-ticking. I mentioned this to my partner, who was horizontal by the pool with sunglasses on and no intention of moving. She opened one eye and said, "We're doing Tuscany wrong in exactly the right way," which I found both annoyingly pithy and completely accurate. The villa had become its own destination, the view changing hourly with light and cloud, the swallows performing their evening circuits, the particular quality of afternoon heat that makes any movement feel like an achievement.

Our gentle explorations rarely exceeded a few miles. A walk through oak woods where we startled a family of wild pigs and retreated with the dignity of people who absolutely meant to turn back anyway. An afternoon at a local vineyard where the tasting notes were delivered with such passionate vagueness that we simply nodded and bought bottles based on label attractiveness. Evenings on the terrace as the sky performed its slow colour shift, fireflies appearing like someone had scattered faulty fairy lights through the hedgerows.

I had worried, booking a week in what is essentially a very beautiful middle of nowhere, that we might grow restless. The opposite proved true. Each day the doing of very little became easier, more skilful, almost an art form. I perfected the angle of my lounger for optimal reading light and napping breeze. I developed opinions about which hour produced the best pool temperature. I became, in short, insufferably relaxed, the sort of person who says "we must do this more often" while knowing perfectly well that normal life will reclaim us with its usual efficiency.

On our final morning I packed with the reluctance of a child leaving a party. The satnav, I noticed, suggested a completely different route back to the main road, one that would have avoided my goat track entirely. I chose not to mention this to my partner. Some lessons, I felt, are best kept between oneself and a particularly judgemental rosemary bush.