I should have known that late October in Umbria would have its own ideas about my holiday wardrobe. There I was, sat on a delayed flight to Rome, smug in my linen trousers and a thin cotton shirt, mentally rehearsing how I would sip chilled wine on a sun-drenched terrace. The weather app had shown a cheerful sun icon. It had not shown the fourteen degrees and persistent drizzle that actually greeted me at Fiumicino.

The drive north to Orvieto did little to improve my mood or my outfit choice. The Autostrada wound through countryside that looked magnificent, admittedly, but magnificently grey. Rolling hills emerged from low cloud like half-hearted watercolours. I passed fields of recently harvested sunflowers, their enormous heads bowed in what I chose to interpret as sympathy.

Finding the property proved entertaining in itself. My sat-nav developed a sudden passion for tiny tracks barely wide enough for a determined bicycle. I found myself crawling past abandoned farm buildings, wondering if I had accidentally driven into a particularly committed rustic renovation project. Then the lane opened up, and there it was: a solid stone farmhouse with terracotta roof tiles and shutters that had clearly seen better decades. The sort of place that looks faintly grumpy in poor weather, like a cat that has been woken from a nap.

I tumbled out of the car, still in my ridiculous linen, and promptly discovered that autumn in Umbria comes with mud. The generous variety of mud. There was the slick clay near the entrance, the pebbly sort by the olive grove, and something particularly adhesive near what I later learned was the old well. I performed an involuntary slide that would have impressed at the Winter Olympics, saved only by grabbing a rather spiky shrub. My welcome to rural Italy involved bleeding slightly and laughing at myself, which set a useful tone for the week.

The owner, a practical woman called Luisa who appeared in wellies and a substantial waterproof coat, regarded my attire with the expression of someone watching a toddler attempt quantum physics. She showed me round with efficient kindness, pointing out the wood-burning stove with the emphasis of someone who had seen too many optimistic English visitors before. The pool, she noted, was technically open until the end of October. Technically. We both looked at it, grey and uninviting under a sky the colour of old dishwater, and shared a moment of silent understanding.

What struck me immediately was how the season had transformed the place from whatever summer paradise the brochure suggested. The garden was in productive decline: tomato plants heavy with fruit that would never ripen, basil gone leggy and bitter, grape vines with leaves turning the sort of yellow that looks beautiful in photographs and slightly melancholy in person. The outdoor dining area, clearly designed for long warm evenings, stood damp and leaf-strewn, its pergola bare now, the wisteria long finished.

Yet there was something about this autumnal version that began to work on me. Luisa left me with a bottle of her own olive oil, pressed from the surrounding trees just weeks before, and some fresh walnuts from the garden. The kitchen, with its ancient tiled surfaces and slightly temperamental gas hob, felt immediately like the right place to be. I lit the wood stove with the enthusiasm of the desperate and discovered that watching rain run down ancient windows while properly warm is an entirely different pleasure from the terrace fantasy I had imagined.

By evening, the temperature had dropped further. I ventured out briefly to the village, a ten-minute walk that became fifteen as I navigated puddles and admired how the stone buildings seemed to glow against the darkening sky. A small bar offered thick hot chocolate and the company of locals who clearly found October entirely normal and my surprise at it faintly amusing.

That first night, I slept under heavy blankets with the window cracked open to hear the rain. The summer version of this holiday would have been lovely, no doubt. But there was something about arriving foolish and underdressed, about the place insisting on its autumn self rather than my imagined version, that felt more genuinely like travel. Like being somewhere real rather than somewhere convenient.

I woke to mist and the smell of woodsmoke from neighbouring farms. My linen trousers stayed firmly in the case. And I began, properly, to settle in.