I have never been so happy to see a washing machine in my life. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The drive from Perugia airport to San Feliciano was supposed to take forty minutes. I had it all planned: collect the hire car, glide through rolling Umbrian countryside, arrive at the lakeside property with enough daylight to crack open a beer on the terrace and watch the sun dip behind Isola Maggiore. What actually happened was that I missed the turning for the E45, ended up in a village called something like San Terriblename, and spent twenty minutes trying to reverse through an olive grove while a local dog judged me from a wall. By the time I found the right road, my phone had died, the sat nav had given up, and I was navigating by the position of the sun like some sort of inept medieval explorer.

The property itself, when I finally staggered up to it, was one of those low-slung stone villas with terracotta tiles and shutters that look like they have been baked into the hillside. I fumbled with the key box, dropped the code sheet, and managed to lock myself out on the balcony within my first four minutes of arrival. There I stood, surrounded by my own luggage, staring at Lake Trasimeno through the glass doors like a goldfish in a very specific bowl.

But here is the thing about mishaps when you are properly knackered: eventually they become funny. I sat on that balcony for a good ten minutes before remembering the spare key under the terracotta pot, and in that forced pause, something shifted. The lake was doing that late-afternoon shimmer thing. A fisherman in a tiny boat was making impossibly slow progress across the water. Somewhere below, someone was cooking with garlic. My shoulders dropped. I laughed, actually laughed, at the absurdity of my own panic.

The villa was simple and right, the sort of place that does not shout for attention. Terracotta floors that stayed cool underfoot. A kitchen with a view of cypress trees. The washing machine, which I discovered with the relief of a man who had spilled coffee down his only decent shirt during the olive grove incident. I put a load on immediately, like the wild holidaymaker I am.

I did not do much that first evening. I walked down to San Feliciano's little harbour, found a bench, and watched the light change. The village is not pretending to be anything grand. Small boats, a few restaurants, locals passing on scooters with that particular Italian lack of urgency. I ate somewhere unmemorable and entirely perfect: grilled lake fish, white wine that cost less than a London pint, bread that tasted of actual wheat.

The days that followed settled into a rhythm so lazy it barely qualifies as rhythm. Mornings on the terrace with coffee and a book I had been meaning to read for three years. The occasional stroll down to the water's edge, where I would watch the ferry to Isola Maggiore and think about taking it, then not bother. Afternoons of proper heat, the kind that makes movement seem foolish, spent dozing or reading the same paragraph twice. Evenings of slow walks through lanes that smelled of jasmine and warm stone, finding somewhere for aperitivo, watching the lake turn silver then grey then black.

I did explore, in my fashion. I cycled one morning to Torricella, a village so quiet I thought I had imagined it, and drank an espresso in a bar where the owner seemed faintly surprised to see me. I found a tiny beach near Sant'Arcangelo where locals swam and I paddled like a coward because the lake was still May-cold. I bought bread and pecorino from a shop in Passignano sul Trasimeno and ate them in the garden with figs that had fallen from a neighbour's overhanging tree.

But mostly I did very little, and that very little felt like the point. There is a particular joy to slowing down so completely that you notice the way light moves across a wall, or the particular sound of lake water against a hull, or how long it takes a lizard to cross a terrace. I am not normally good at this. I am the person who makes lists on holiday, who feels faintly guilty about naps. Something about that first evening on the wrong side of the balcony door broke something open. The washing machine hummed. The world did not end.

On my last morning, I sat with my coffee and watched a heron stand motionless in the reeds for so long that I forgot to check my watch. I thought about all the things I had not done: the castle I had not visited, the island I had not crossed to, the hill towns I had not driven to. I felt only gratitude. The fish had been good. The wine had been cheap. The sun had done its work on me.

I left the key under the pot for the next person, hoping they might also lock themselves out at least once.