I had been dreaming of Umbrian hills for months, so when my sat-nav cheerfully announced "you have arrived" while I was clearly staring at a goat in somebody's driveway, I knew the holiday was off to a flying start. The goat, for the record, looked deeply unimpressed. I had missed the turning for the property by roughly half a mile, which doesn't sound like much until you factor in Italian country lanes that seem to have been designed by a caffeinated squirrel.

The villa itself, when I finally found it, sat perched above Assisi like it had been there since before arguments were invented. Stone walls the colour of honey, shutters that actually shut, and a terrace that made me forget I'd just spent twenty minutes reversing past an olive grove. I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of a man who had been up since four in the morning and promptly discovered that my "walking shoes" were in fact both right-footed. Packing at midnight, I have since decided, is a form of self-sabotage I should probably discuss with someone.

The first morning delivered that particular Umbrian magic where the air feels like warm silk and the hills roll away in every direction like a green and gold sea. I had planned a proper hike, something ambitious that would take me through meadows and maybe past one of those hermitages you read about. The weather, however, had other ideas. By ten o'clock the temperature had climbed into the sort of numbers that make British people consider writing to their MP. The path I had chosen, which started promisingly enough through woodland near the property, quickly became an exercise in finding the next patch of shade.

I am not too proud to admit that I turned back. There is a particular moment, somewhere around the point where your shirt becomes a second skin and you start envying the lizards, where stubbornness ceases to be a virtue. I retreated to the villa's pool, which I had initially told myself was "for emergencies only," and spent an hour floating with the kind of shame that dissolves remarkably quickly in cool water.

The afternoon brought a gentler sort of walking. I wandered down to Assisi itself, sticking to the shaded side of streets like a sun-avoiding vampire, and found that the town rewards slow exploration far more than heroic marching anyway. The basilica's cool interior was genuinely spiritual, though I suspect my gratitude was partly thermal. I ate gelato on the Piazza del Comune and watched tourists making the same red-faced mistakes I had, charging up hills in the midday heat with the determination of people who had not yet learned their lesson.

The following days settled into a rhythm that felt borrowed from someone wiser. Early walks, while the dew still clung to the grass and the temperature remained friendly. Then retreat, like a sensible lizard, to wait out the fiercest hours. Late afternoon would find me walking again, sometimes just around the property's own grounds, sometimes along the lanes that wound past vineyards where the grapes were beginning to think about ripening.

One evening I walked further than intended, chasing the sunset along a ridge, and found myself caught in one of those sudden Umbrian downpours that arrive like a surprise party. I sheltered under a cypress tree and laughed at myself, soaked and ridiculous, thinking about my carefully planned hikes and my matching right shoes. The rain passed in twenty minutes, leaving everything smelling of thyme and wet earth, and I walked back in the cooling dark feeling something like contentment.

I never did manage that ambitious coastal-style hike I had imagined, though Umbria's hills gave me something better in the end. The weather forced a slower pace, a willingness to adapt, which is not my natural mode. I came home with better colour on my face than my feet, and a new appreciation for the strategic retreat. The goat, I like to think, would have approved.