I have never been more grateful for a sat nav than I was driving into Fratticciola di Cortona in late October, though I will admit it tried to murder me twice. The first time was a charming little dirt track that looked like it led to a vineyard but actually led to someone's very private olive grove, complete with a dog that clearly had opinions about British number plates. The second time was what I can only describe as a road that existed in theory rather than practice, winding through cypress trees that seemed to close in like something from a fairy tale, except the fairy tale was mostly me swearing at a rental Fiat.

We had chosen autumn deliberately, my partner and I, after a summer in London that felt like standing inside a hairdryer. October in Tuscany promised misty mornings, proper red wine weather, and the last gasp of warmth before the hills turned properly moody. What we had not fully prepared for was how completely the season would reshape everything, starting with the fact that half the shops in Cortona had already begun their winter hibernation. The baker we had read about online, the one with the walnut bread? Closed until March. The little enoteca with the terrace? Shuttered. It was like arriving at a party just as the host was putting the good cheese away.

The property itself, when we finally found it, sat on a ridge with views that made the sat nav trauma almost worthwhile. Almost. It was one of those solid stone farmhouses that look like they have been there since before arguments were invented, with a pool that had been covered for the season, looking slightly forlorn under its tarpaulin. The owner, a brisk woman called Luisa, met us with keys and a warning about the heating. "October," she said, with the weight of someone who had watched too many optimistic English tourists shiver through November, "is when Tuscany remembers it is not summer anymore."

She was not wrong. The first morning, I woke to a mist so thick I genuinely could not see the olive trees twenty metres from the bedroom window. It was not the romantic, golden-hour mist of Instagram. It was proper, pea-soup, where-am-I mist, and it transformed the landscape into something almost unsettling. The cypress trees became dark slashes against grey nothing. The distant hills vanished completely. I made coffee and stood at the kitchen window feeling like the last person in a world that had politely removed itself for cleaning.

But here is the thing about October in this corner of Tuscany: the mist burns off. Always. By ten o'clock the sun had punched through, and the world returned in sharper focus than summer ever managed. The light had an edge to it, a clarity that made the stone walls glow amber and the remaining vine leaves look impossibly red. We walked the property's own olive grove, the grass still damp, and collected windfalls that Luisa had said we could take. My partner, who had packed for "Tuscan sunshine" in a vague, generic sense, spent the whole week in the one jumper she had optimistically thrown in. I lived in a fleece that made me look like a geography teacher on a field trip. We were not glamorous. We were warm.

The seasonal rhythm dictated everything. We ate dinner at six because it was dark by then, not because we had become our parents. We built fires in the evening not for atmosphere but for actual survival against a damp that crept through stone walls older than our entire country. The local restaurants that remained open had switched to heartier menus, thick ribollita and wild boar stew, portions that assumed you were storing fat for winter. One night, in a trattoria in Cortona that had exactly three tables occupied, the owner brought us complimentary vin santo and cantucci without being asked, because apparently that is what you do for the stubborn few still touring in the off-season.

I had worried, driving in, that we had picked the wrong time. That autumn was the consolation prize, the season you settled for when you could not afford July. But standing on that ridge as the mist lifted, watching the Val di Chiana appear slowly like a developing photograph, I understood something I had not expected. Tuscany in October does not perform for you. The summer crowds are gone, the pool is covered, the good cheese has been put away. What remains is something more honest, more particular, more quietly itself. You have to meet it on its own terms, in your one inadequate jumper, slightly lost on a dirt track, hoping the dog has finished judging you.

I would not trade that for all the summer sunshine in the world. Well. Maybe a little of it. But only in July.