Getting to Nocera Umbra was meant to be straightforward, which in hindsight should have been my first warning. I had the sat nav, a printed map as backup because I do not trust technology abroad, and a hire car that smelled faintly of pine air freshener and regret. Somewhere between Foligno and what I thought was my turning, I became intimately acquainted with a road that grew narrower with every metre until I was essentially driving through someone's olive grove. An actual nonno stood by his gate, arms folded, watching me navigate between trees with the expression of a man who had seen this exact scene at least forty times before. I waved. He did not wave back. Fair enough, really.

The property itself sits just above the town, and I will admit that the moment I finally crunched onto the gravel driveway, I may have made a small involuntary noise of relief. The views are obscene. Rolling hills, cypress trees doing their dramatic vertical thing, and enough green to make you wonder why you ever bother with cities. The house is stone, properly old, with terracotta floors that stay cool even when the afternoon heat has you considering moving into the fridge. I dumped my bags, opened every window, and immediately began thinking about dinner. This was to become the defining theme of the week.

Nocera Umbra is not a place that shouts about itself, which suits me perfectly. The town has a Wednesday market that I had already circled in biro on a crumpled printout, and I arrived with the determined energy of someone who owns too many cookbooks and uses perhaps three recipes from them. The market stretches through the centro storico, stalls piled with tomatoes that actually smell of tomatoes, bunches of wild asparagus, and wheels of pecorino that the vendor will cut with a wire and hand you a sliver to taste before you've even committed to buying. I committed. I committed repeatedly.

My first evening's self-catering attempt was, I will be honest, a minor disaster. I had purchased what I believed were courgettes but were in fact some manner of squash that refused to soften no matter how long I cursed at it over a pan. The olive oil was local and sensational, which helped mask my errors. The bread from the forno in town was still warm when I bought it, and I ate half of it in the car park like an animal. Back at the house, I sat on the terrace with my crunchy squash, good bread, and a bottle of Grechetto that cost less than a London sandwich, and I decided that failure in this context still tasted better than most of my successes at home.

By day three I had developed a system. Morning trip to the market or the small alimentari near the main piazza, where the woman behind the counter began recognising me and would reach for the sliced mortadella before I had even fully entered. The porchetta van appears on certain days with no schedule I could decipher, and I once spent twenty minutes hovering near it pretending to admire a church facade until it opened. Worth every awkward minute. The meat is sliced thick, stuffed into crackling-crusted rolls, and eaten standing up while grease runs down your wrist. There is no dignified way to do this. Do not attempt one.

I did try to recreate a proper Umbrian lentil soup, using the small green lentils from Castelluccio that the region is known for. I soaked them. I simmered them with celery and carrot and a bay leaf I had picked from the garden. They were fine. They were perfectly adequate. They were not the bowl I had at a tiny trattoria in the lower town, where the owner brought it out without me ordering and seemed faintly offended when I tried to pay separately for it. Some things, I reflected, stirring my acceptable but not transcendent version, are simply better left to people who have been making them for decades. This is not surrender. This is wisdom.

The kitchen at the property is properly equipped, which became both blessing and curse. I had space to attempt things. A long wooden table inside for prep, another outside for eating when the evening cooled enough that the candles would stay lit. I made bruschetta with proper pronunciation and everything, rubbing garlic directly onto charred bread like someone who had read about doing this in a magazine. I grilled sausages from the macelleria, their fennel scent drifting across the terrace until I was essentially eating in a cloud of my own making. One night I attempted a tart with local figs and the honey that comes from these hills, and the pastry collapsed in a way that was structurally unsound but still delicious. I ate it with a spoon and felt no shame.

What I did not expect was how much the rhythm of shopping and cooking would shape the days. There is no supermarket dash, no grabbing something from the reduced section because you are tired and it is Tuesday. You go to the market because it is Wednesday and that is when the market happens. You buy what looks good, which is everything, and then you figure out what to do with it. The butcher will tell you how long to cook something. The woman selling cheese will suggest a particular pecorino stagionato for grating over pasta. You nod as if you knew this already, then follow instructions like a student.

On my final morning I made one last trip to the forno for bread still warm from the oven, and to the fruttivendolo for peaches so ripe they bruised if you looked at them wrong. I ate these on the terrace with the last of my coffee, watching the mist lift from the valley below, and I thought about the squash I had mangled, the lentils I had merely approximated, the pastry I had spooned from a dish like a child. I had not become a better cook in a week. But I had, perhaps, become slightly better at paying attention to what I was eating and where it came from and who had grown it or raised it or baked it. This seems, in retrospect, considerably more valuable than technical proficiency.

The nonno was not in his olive grove when I left. I like to imagine he was somewhere having his own slow breakfast, perhaps with bread from the same forno, perhaps with peaches equally fragile. I drove away without getting lost, which felt like its own small triumph, though I suspect this was luck rather than learning. Some things, like certain soups, are simply better when someone else has made them. The memory of that week, though, I made myself, and it tastes of good oil and warm bread and the particular sweetness of figs eaten straight from the tree because you could not wait any longer.