I have never been so relieved to see a swimming pool in my life, and I had not even got out of the car yet. The journey from Pisa airport to Foiano della Chiana had been one of those classic British-holiday-in-Italy experiences: wrong turn at a roundabout near Arezzo, a heated debate about whether the sat nav was having a laugh, and then the final indignity of me reversing into a very solid and very unimpressed olive tree. The crunch was minimal. The embarrassment was maximal. The tree, I am fairly certain, is still telling its friends about the idiot in the Fiat Panda.

But then we crested the little hill and there it was: a proper Tuscan farmhouse, all honey-coloured stone and terracotta roof tiles, with cypress trees standing to attention like green exclamation marks. The kind of place that makes you instinctively lower your voice, as if the landscape itself has shushed you. My wife gave me that look. The one that says, "You may have attacked an olive tree, but you have redeemed yourself."

The owners, a lovely couple called Marco and Luisa, emerged with the relaxed warmth of people who have absolutely nowhere to be. No rush, no fuss, just a tour of the place that felt more like being shown round a friend's house. The kitchen had one of those enormous fireplaces you could practically stand in, though Marco explained with a chuckle that we would not need it in August. The beams were dark and knobbly, the floors were cool terracotta, and everything smelled faintly of lavender and old wood. My daughter immediately claimed the bedroom with the wrought-iron bed, my son disappeared to investigate the pool, and I stood in the garden trying to look like a man who regularly holidays in Tuscan farmhouses rather than one who had just committed arboreal assault.

What struck me most was the silence. Not the awkward kind, but the deep, wrapping sort that makes you realise how much noise you normally live with. Just birds, the occasional distant tractor, and the faint clink of Luisa bringing us a bottle of her own olive oil. I thought about mentioning the tree incident, then wisely decided that some confessions are better saved for the drive home.

The pool became our immediate universe. Not flashy, not infinity-edged for Instagram, just a good honest rectangle of blue water surrounded by sun-bleached loungers and a pergola dripping with vines. We spent that first afternoon doing absolutely nothing of consequence, which is rather the point of this sort of holiday. The children invented a game involving a inflatable watermelon that made no sense to anyone over fourteen. My wife read three chapters of a book she had been carrying since March. I floated on my back and contemplated the olive oil situation, feeling genuinely moved by how something so simple could taste so completely of somewhere.

By evening, the light had turned that impossible Tuscan gold, the kind that makes everything look like a Renaissance painting even when it is just your own pale legs sticking out of shorts. We walked the five minutes into Foiano itself, just to stretch our legs and find somewhere for pizza. The town was shuttered and sleepy in that perfect Italian way, all ochre walls and sudden glimpses of valley through archways. We ate outside, the children miraculously well-behaved from sun and swimming, and I drank a Chianti that cost less than a pint in London and tasted like liquid geography.

Walking back in the dark, fireflies flickering in the hedgerows like tiny faulty torches, I felt that rare holiday feeling of being exactly where you should be. The olive tree and I had made our peace. Tomorrow we would do very little again, and it would be wonderful.