I have never been more grateful for a sat nav than I was at half past four on a Tuesday afternoon, crawling up a dirt track somewhere between Orvieto and complete oblivion. We had flown into Rome, picked up a hire car that smelled suspiciously of wet dog, and set off for what the brochure promised was a "charming rustic retreat" near San Venanzo. What the brochure did not mention was that charming rustic retreats apparently require you to navigate a road that would challenge a mountain goat.

The mishap came at the final junction. My wife was consulting her phone, I was consulting the sat nav, and our youngest was consulting a packet of crisps in the back. Three conflicting opinions, zero actual clarity. I took what I felt was the executive decision and turned left. We spent twenty minutes ascending what I can only describe as a glorified footpath before reaching a dead end at a field full of extremely judgmental sheep. Reversing down was not my finest hour. My wife developed a sudden fascination with her window. The sheep said nothing, but their eyes spoke volumes.

When we finally found the proper turning, the house revealed itself gradually, as these places do. A low stone building with weathered shutters and a pergola that looked like it had been growing there since the Romans packed up. The key was in a lockbox, which took me a further ten minutes and some creative language to open. By this point the children had decamped to investigate a lizard on the wall, and my wife had located the outdoor table and was sitting down with the expression of someone who had survived something.

But here is the thing about first impressions that go slightly wrong. They make the eventual arrival feel earned. I pushed open the door and there was that particular coolness of thick stone walls, the smell of somewhere that has been lived in properly. The kitchen opened straight onto a covered terrace with a view I had not been prepared for. Rolling hills, cypress dots, a sky that seemed to operate on entirely different rules of blueness. The children abandoned their lizard. Even the teenager looked up from his phone.

We had brought supplies from a supermarket near the motorway, the usual holiday overbuying of pasta and bread and cheese that we would never finish. I put the kettle on the gas hob, because of course there was a gas hob, and we sat on those slightly wobbly terrace chairs with mugs of tea that tasted better than any tea has a right to. A gecko appeared on the wall and stayed there, observing. We observed back.

I think what struck me most, once the journey's comedy had faded, was the particular quality of quiet. Not silence exactly. There were cicadas, distant dogs, occasional vehicles on roads too far away to identify. But the absence of that low hum of constant activity you forget you are carrying. The children played cards at the table. My wife read a book she had been carrying unread for six months. I did absolutely nothing productive whatsoever, and it felt like a small victory.

The pool was down a few stone steps, apparently shared with a couple of other properties, though we saw no one that first evening. The water was that particular green-blue of proper countryside pools, not the chemical turquoise of leisure centres. The youngest was in before I could mention depth or supervision. The teenager followed, with the resigned enthusiasm of someone pretending they were only doing this ironically.

By the time the light started to go, that long slow fade that happens properly in places without streetlamps, we had established our positions. My wife had claimed the hammock. I had the wobbly chair. The children had discovered that the WiFi worked best in one specific corner of the terrace and were conducting a small camp there. We ate bread and cheese and tomatoes that actually tasted of something, and I thought about how often I confuse the idea of a holiday with the need to do things, to see things, to come back with evidence of improvement.

The sat nav mishap, the sheep, the lockbox struggle. They had become funny already, the way these things do. More than that, they had become part of the story we were already telling each other. The house had settled around us, or we into it. I could hear the children arguing gently about something inconsequential. My wife was asleep in the hammock. Somewhere, presumably, those sheep were still judging other travellers.

I poured the last of the wine and watched the hills disappear into darkness. Tomorrow we might walk to the village, or we might not. There was a bakery someone had mentioned, and a church with frescoes. Or there was this terrace, this view, this particular nothing that felt like exactly enough. The gecko reappeared. I raised my glass to him, a fellow creature who had found his spot and was staying there. He did not respond, but I felt we understood each other.