I have never been brilliant with directions, so it was hardly a surprise when I took the wrong turning off the E45 and found myself bumping down a farm track surrounded by sunflowers that looked decidedly unimpressed with my life choices. August in Umbria, you see, turns everything golden and slightly dozy, including my sense of navigation. The sat nav had given up somewhere near Arezzo, and I was relying on instinct, which is always a terrible idea when my instinct is primarily fuelled by airport coffee and a stale panini.

After twenty minutes of apologetic reversing and one slightly tense encounter with a tractor whose driver clearly had somewhere more important to be, I finally spotted the stone walls and terracotta roof of the Citta di Castello property. It sat there in the afternoon heat like something from a faded postcard, all weathered shutters and climbing vines that had probably been there since before I was born. The cicadas were going absolutely berserk in the olive trees, that relentless August chorus that sounds like someone has left a radio tuned to static in a distant room.

The heat hit me properly when I stepped out of the car. Not the damp, clinging sort you get on a British summer afternoon, but something drier and more assertive, the kind of warmth that makes you move slower and think about cold drinks with an intensity that borders on spiritual. The key was under a terracotta pot by the door, which felt thrillingly illicit until I realised this is simply how things work in rural Italy in high summer. Trust, and a healthy dose of who on earth would bother coming all this way to steal anything.

Inside, the house was deliciously cool. Thick stone walls, you see, built by people who understood that August in this part of the world is not to be trifled with. The floors were terracotta tiles, slightly uneven beneath my feet, and the shutters were half-closed against the sun, throwing striped shadows across a kitchen table that looked like it had hosted a thousand long lunches. I opened the fridge and found it empty except for a bottle of water left by the owners, which I drank standing at the sink like a man who had just crossed a desert rather than driven from Perugia airport.

I will be honest, my first attempt at making coffee on the ancient hob was not a success. The moka pot and I have never been properly introduced, and in my eagerness for caffeine I managed to produce something that tasted of burnt metal and regret. I sat on the terrace with this disappointing beverage and watched the light change, which is really what you come to Umbria for in late summer. The gold softens to something pinker, the shadows lengthen, and the whole landscape seems to exhale after the intensity of the day.

The garden was clearly suffering from the August drought, patches of brown among the green, but there were still tomatoes ripening in a raised bed and herbs that released their scent when I brushed past them. I had planned to drive into Citta di Castello proper that evening, to wander the medieval streets and find somewhere for dinner, but the heat had rather taken it out of me. Instead I ate bread and cheese from a supermarket I had passed in my earlier wandering, drank a bottle of local white that was probably too cold and certainly too quickly consumed, and fell asleep on a wicker chair while trying to read a novel I have since forgotten entirely.

Waking to find myself slightly damp with evening dew and covered in what I choose to believe were friendly mosquitoes, I realised this was exactly the sort of holiday I needed. No itinerary, no expectations, just the particular rhythm of an Umbrian August where the days stretch long and slow and the nights come as a gentle relief rather than a sudden darkness. I stumbled inside, found the bedroom with its iron bedframe and thin cotton sheets, and slept properly for the first time in months.

The next morning I woke to a sky that already promised more of the same heat, and the distant sound of church bells that seemed to be competing with the cicadas for dominance. I made coffee again, with slightly more success, and sat on that terrace in my pyjamas feeling unreasonably pleased with myself. The sunflowers I had wrong-turned through yesterday were visible on the hillside, already turning their heads to face the east, and I thought about how different this would all be in spring, when the green would be softer and the air full of rain rather than dust, or in autumn when the harvest brings its own bustle and the light becomes something sharper and more melancholy.

But August has its own particular magic, even if that magic is mostly about surrendering to the heat and moving through your day at a pace that would embarrass you back home. I had come expecting to see things, to tick off churches and viewpoints and recommended restaurants. Instead, in that first day and night, I had learned something simpler and more valuable. The season shapes the place, and the place shapes your experience, and my experience was going to be about stillness and observation and the occasional minor disaster with kitchen equipment.

I did eventually make it into town, and to the local pool I had read about, and to a vineyard that was harvesting early because of the heat. But those first impressions, that arrival in the thick of an Umbrian summer, set the tone for everything that followed. The wrong turn, the burnt coffee, the dozy afternoon, the wine-soaked evening. It was not the holiday I had planned. It was, of course, much better than that.