I have never been so pleased to see a pothole in my life. After eight hours of driving from Folkestone, two wrong turns near Perugia, and a spirited argument with a sat nav that insisted "Via della Fonte" was definitely a main road and not, as it turned out, a goat track, that crater in the tarmac meant civilisation was close. Or at least that other vehicles had been this way before. Possibly recently.

The mishap came five minutes later. I had stopped to photograph a particularly handsome cypress tree, as one does in Umbria, and managed to lock my keys in the boot. There I stood, surrounded by undulating olive groves, the afternoon sun doing that golden thing it does in central Italy, holding nothing but a phone with twelve percent battery and a packet of mints. A farmer on a puttering Vespa eventually took pity, produced a wire coat hanger from seemingly nowhere, and had me back on the road before I could properly explain in my GCSE Italian that I was, in fact, an idiot. I gave him the mints. He seemed pleased enough.

The final approach to Giove is the sort that makes you forgive everything. The village sits perched on its hilltop like it has been posing for painters since the Renaissance, which, to be fair, it essentially has. I wound up through narrow streets, past stone houses with terracotta roofs and the occasional geranium box, until the property revealed itself: a substantial stone farmhouse with that particular honeyed colour the Umbrian sun seems to bake into everything.

My first impression, stepping from the car with slightly trembling legs, was of quiet. Not the oppressive quiet of isolation, but the settled, purposeful silence of a place that has nothing to prove. A dog barked somewhere distant. A breeze moved through an olive tree with a sound like someone turning pages. That was all.

The owners had left the key in a ceramic pot by the door, which felt charmingly trusting until I realised there were probably about eleven people in the village who still remembered when this place was a working farm, and who would notice a stranger carrying a television before they reached the bottom of the lane. I pushed open the heavy wooden door and was hit by that particular coolness of thick stone walls, the kind that makes you understand why people built like this centuries before air conditioning.

The kitchen smelled faintly of rosemary, which I later discovered grew in enthusiastic bushes outside the window. The floor was terracotta tile, worn smooth in patches by generations of feet. I ran my hand along the wall and found it slightly uneven, built by someone who cared more that it would stand for four hundred years than that it would photograph well for a brochure. Though it does, of course. I put my bag down on the long wooden table and just stood there, listening to my own breathing slow down.

I had planned to unpack immediately, to be efficient, to perhaps walk into the village for supplies before the shops closed. Instead I found a bottle of local wine the owners had left, poured a small glass, and carried it out to the terrace. The view rolled away from me in layers: garden giving way to olive grove giving way to wooded valley, with hilltop towns visible in the middle distance, each one crowned with its own little campanile. The light was doing that lengthening thing, turning everything slightly pink, and I thought about how I had rushed here, had fretted about motorways and deadlines and whether I had packed enough socks, and how none of it mattered now.

I thought too about that farmer, and his patience, and his unexpected coat hanger, and how sometimes the smallest kindnesses from strangers stay with you longer than the views. Though the views help.

I did eventually unpack, and I did eventually find the village shop, though I suspect I arrived after they would have preferred to close. But that first hour, standing on the terrace with my wine warming slightly in my hand, watching the swallows dart about and feeling the day finally settle onto my shoulders like a comfortable blanket, that was when Umbria began to work its particular magic on me. I was not in a hurry anymore. I was not sure I would ever be in a hurry again.