I have never been a natural navigator, and my first attempt at finding our holiday let in Todi confirmed this with embarrassing clarity. We had flown into Rome, picked up a hire car that felt roughly the size of a small bus, and set off north into Umbria with the sort of confidence that only comes from having glanced at Google Maps precisely once. Three wrong turns, one heated debate about whether I had said left or right, and a spectacular reverse into an olive tree later, we finally spotted the stone building clinging to the hillside above the Tiber valley. I reversed into that olive tree with such commitment that I am surprised the owner did not come out to applaud. The scratch on the bumper would become a recurring joke for the entire fortnight.

The property sat just outside Todi itself, a converted farmhouse with a pool that caught the morning sun and held onto it with greedy determination until early evening. My first impression, once I had stopped sweating and apologising, was how profoundly quiet everything felt. Not the uncomfortable silence of a held breath, but a settled, ancient stillness that made my usual city racket seem faintly absurd. The only sounds were cicadas, the occasional distant church bell, and what I later learned was a neighbour's rather vocal cockerel who took his duties with excessive seriousness.

We dumped our bags and did what any sensible person would do after four hours of driving and mild marital strife. We opened a bottle of local Grechetto, found two sun-loungers that had clearly been positioned by someone who understood the trajectory of afternoon shade, and simply stopped. I had brought three novels with the optimistic intention of finishing them all. I managed one and a half, which I consider a personal triumph. There is something deeply satisfying about reading in short, interrupted bursts, looking up every few pages to watch a hawk circling over the valley or to debate whether it was too early for another glass of wine. It never was.

The days developed their own unhurried rhythm. Mornings began with coffee on the terrace, watching the mist lift from the valley floor like someone slowly pulling back a blanket. We would wander down to Todi's centro storico, a proper hill town with medieval walls and sudden views that made you stop mid-step. The duomo surprised me with its stripped-back elegance, and the piazza del Popolo became our default spot for aperitivo, though we never quite mastered the Italian art of making a single drink last two hours. I am too thirsty and too English for that particular discipline.

Lunches were simple affairs from the small supermarket near Porta Romana: pecorino cheese, paper-thin prosciutto, tomatoes that actually tasted of something, and bread that went stale with admirable speed. We ate at the property most days, grazing rather than dining, reading between mouthfuls, dozing off in the afternoon heat with books sliding off our chests. I cannot remember the last time I allowed myself such conspicuous laziness. There is a particular guilt to doing very little, I find, a nagging sense that one ought to be achieving something. Umbria wore that impulse down until it seemed faintly ridiculous, like worrying about your posture during a massage.

Some afternoons we made brief expeditions to nearby villages, though never with much purpose. We drove to Monte Castello di Vibio one evening, attracted mostly by the promise of the world's smallest theatre, and stayed for a sunset that turned the surrounding hills the colour of ripe apricots. Another day we found a vineyard offering informal tastings, where the owner spoke no English and our Italian extended to ordering food and apologising, yet somehow we communicated through enthusiastic gesturing and shared appreciation of his Sagrantino. I understood perhaps every fifth word and enjoyed all of them.

What struck me most, looking back, was how little we needed beyond sunshine, a comfortable chair, and time that moved at its own pace rather than ours. I had arrived with mental lists of possible day trips, restaurants to research, experiences to accumulate. I abandoned most of them without regret. The holiday became instead about small, repeated pleasures: the particular cool of the pool after baking on the terrace, the way evening light caught the stone walls of Todi across the valley, the satisfying weight of a finished chapter as the afternoon faded.

On our final morning, I sat with my coffee and watched the same mist perform its slow retreat, the same cockerel announce his redundant news, and felt something close to reluctance at the thought of returning to schedules and notifications and the general urgency of ordinary life. I had not become a different person exactly. I had simply remembered that doing very little, done properly, is itself a small achievement. The scratch on the bumper remained, a tiny memorial to my navigational failings and, I suppose, to a fortnight where getting lost, in every sense, turned out to be the whole point.