I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock the wrong villa. There I was, standing in the blazing afternoon sun of Dicomano, jiggling a key in a door that stubbornly refused to budge, while a very confused Italian cat watched me from the windowsill. It took a full ten minutes and a rather pointed phone call from the actual owner of that particular house before I realised my villa was two doors down, partially hidden behind a tangle of bougainvillea that I had mistaken for a hedge. I slunk past with my suitcase, pretending I had absolutely not just attempted to break into someone's home.

The correct villa, when I finally found it, was an absolute dream. Stone walls the colour of honey, shutters that actually shuttered, and a kitchen that smelled faintly of rosemary and last year's olive oil. I dumped my bags and headed straight for the fridge, which contained precisely one bottle of local wine and a lemon. This, I decided, was a sign from the universe that I needed to visit the market immediately.

The Dicomano market happens on Thursday mornings, and I arrived the next day with the enthusiasm of someone who had been living on airport sandwiches for twelve hours. The piazza transforms into something marvellous. Stall after stall of tomatoes that actually taste of something, pecorino cheese aged to various degrees of stubbornness, and bunches of sage so enormous they look like small shrubs. I bought far more than I could carry, which is my standard approach to markets, and staggered back to the villa with arms full of possibility.

That first evening I attempted something ambitious. I had fresh pasta, I had porcini mushrooms, I had a bottle of Chianti Rufina from the vineyard literally up the road. What I did not have, as I discovered too late, was any actual talent for making mushroom sauce. I stood over the hob watching my expensive fungi reduce to something that resembled brown soup, and I had one of those moments of gentle self-reflection. I am a person who owns three different pasta makers in London. I have watched countless Italian grandmothers on television make this exact dish without breaking a sweat. And yet here I was, defeated by a handful of mushrooms in a foreign kitchen. I ate it anyway, sitting on the terrace with the wine, and decided that brown soup with pasta was actually rather comforting if you did not think about what it was supposed to be.

The following days brought gradual improvement. I learned that the butcher in Dicomano, a man with eyebrows like hedgerows, would actually tell you how to cook things if you asked nicely. I learned that the baker opens at half six and the bread is warm until eight. I learned that I should never attempt to make ribollita without proper cavolo nero, and that substituting spring greens is not a clever hack but a genuine culinary crime.

By the fourth day I had established something of a routine. Morning coffee on the terrace with yesterday's bread and apricot jam from the market. A wander down for provisions, perhaps a piece of schiacciata for lunch. Afternoon reading by the pool with the distant sound of someone else's children splashing. Then the serious business of dinner, which I approached with increasing confidence and decreasing recipe consultation.

My finest hour came with a simple roast chicken, stuffed with lemon and the rosemary that grew in violent profusion outside the kitchen door. I added potatoes that crisped in the rendered fat, and a salad of peppery rocket that I had watched an old woman harvest that morning. I ate it slowly, with another local wine, and felt genuinely pleased with myself in a way that no restaurant reservation has ever managed.

The villa's kitchen became my favourite room. It had clearly been cooked in by proper people for many years. The knives were sharp but mismatched. There was a pasta machine that clamped to the table with satisfying authority. The oven ran slightly hot, which I learned after one batch of slightly scorched cantucci, but once understood it produced the most marvellous roast vegetables.

I visited the market three times in a week, which even I recognised as excessive. But each visit revealed something new. The honey man with his single jar of chestnut honey that tasted almost bitter. The woman selling lampredotto sandwiches from a van, which I tried once and respected but did not repeat. The fruit stall where I bought white peaches so ripe they needed to be eaten over the sink.

On my final evening I made a simple tomato sauce with San Marzano tomatoes, garlic, basil, and butter. I drank the last of my wine. I sat on the terrace as the light faded and the swallows began their evening circuits, and I thought about how rarely I cook properly at home. There is always a reason to rush, to order something, to make do. Here, with a kitchen that invited slowness and ingredients that demanded respect, I had remembered what food could actually be.

I left the next morning with a jar of that chestnut honey, some aged pecorino wrapped in paper, and the certain knowledge that I would be back. Possibly with better mushroom skills. Possibly not. The brown soup had character, after all, and the cat next door probably still talks about the strange English person who tried to burgle its house.