The satnav gave up on us somewhere between Orvieto and nowhere, which is how I found myself reversing a hire car down a gravel track barely wide enough for a determined goat. My partner, ever the optimist, had insisted we could "wing it" from the A1. Three wrong turns later, we were staring at a sign that appeared to read "San Venanzo" but might equally have said "abandon hope." I had that particular sort of holiday tension where you laugh to stop yourself from crying, the kind that makes your shoulders live somewhere near your ears.

We arrived at the property in a cloud of dust and mild marital discord, only to discover I had been frantically rummaging for the wrong set of keys in my bag. The correct ones were, naturally, in the pocket I had checked twice already. The house sat there looking impossibly patient, all honey-coloured stone and terracotta roof tiles, while I performed this ritual humiliation on its doorstep. A lizard watched from the wall with what I can only describe as professional detachment.

But then the door opened, and something shifted. The interior smelled of cool stone and something faintly herby, perhaps from the rosemary bush that had taken enthusiastic ownership of the path outside. The kitchen had that pleasing solidity of somewhere built for actual living rather than holiday pretending, with a proper wooden table that would soon become headquarters for our particular brand of indolence. I ran my hand along the countertop and felt the slight unevenness that comes from decades of use, of bread being kneaded and wine glasses set down with satisfying clunks.

The garden was where the property truly announced itself. A covered terrace with a table that seemed purpose-built for lengthy lunches that drifted into suppers without anyone noticing the transition. Beyond it, the pool caught the afternoon light and held it, utterly still, waiting for someone to disturb its peace. We were that someone, eventually, though not before standing there like a pair of sun-drunk fools, simply breathing it in.

I had brought three books with the ambitious intention of "getting through them." This proved to be the first of many miscalculations. The reality was a single volume, propped open on my chest for hours at a time, read in fragments between dozing and swimming and wondering whether it was too early for a glass of the local Grechetto. It never was, we established. That became something of a motto.

The days developed a rhythm that felt almost embarrassingly simple. Morning coffee on the terrace, watching the light change on the hills opposite, which rolled away in that particular Umbrian fashion, soft and cultivated and ancient-looking. A slow walk to San Venanzo village proper, barely a mile, for bread and whatever looked good at the small shop. The woman who ran it learned our faces by the second visit and started selecting tomatoes for us with the authority of someone who knew exactly how many days until perfect ripeness.

We did venture to Orvieto one morning, drawn by the cathedral as everyone is, but found ourselves peculiarly eager to return. The city was magnificent, of course, all striped marble and impossible verticality, but it required a certain alertness we had already surrendered. The drive back felt like slipping off a tight shoe. There was the house, waiting with its pool and its shade and its particular quality of silence, broken only by cicadas and the occasional distant dog.

I became devoted to doing very little with great intensity. There was the reading, yes, but also the studied observation of a single olive tree from my sun lounger, tracking how its shadow moved across the terrace through the afternoon. There was the swimming, twenty lazy lengths that were really just an excuse to float on my back and watch clouds perform their slow transformations. There was the cooking, if you can call it that, assembly really, of bread and cheese and tomatoes and oil, eaten with fingers and washed down with wine that cost less than a London pint.

My partner took to sketching, a hobby last attempted on another holiday years before. The results were variable, she admitted, but the doing of it pleased her. I would glance up from my book to find her frowning at a cypress tree with the concentration of someone defusing a bomb. We did not discuss the sketches much. That seemed against the spirit of the thing.

On our final evening, we ate leftovers by candlelight and talked about whether we had "made the most" of our week. It was a phrase that felt borrowed from some other kind of holiday, the sort with itineraries and checklists and photographic evidence of cultural consumption. We had done none of that, really. We had moved slowly through warm days, eaten simple food, read and dozed and occasionally spoken, more often simply occupied the same space in companionable silence. I realised, with that particular clarity that comes from removal, that this was precisely what I had needed. Not the absence of activity, but the presence of something else, something harder to name. Presence itself, perhaps. The luxury of being where you are without the nagging sense that you should be somewhere else, doing something more impressive.

The satnav found us easily enough on the return journey, as if mocking our earlier struggles. I did not mind. Some things should be slightly difficult to reach.