I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's olive grove. Twelve hours after leaving Gatwick, there I was, bumping down a gravel track in a Fiat Panda that had definitely seen better days, convinced I was about to become a local legend for all the wrong reasons.

The mishap came five minutes later. I'd stopped to wrestle with my phone, trying to work out whether "continue straight" meant through the stone archway or round it. I chose through it. The archway won. A loud crunch, a sheepish reverse, and I emerged with a wing mirror dangling like a broken limb and a newfound respect for medieval Italian engineering. Nothing says "cultured British tourist" quite like attacking six-hundred-year-old masonry with a hire car.

By the time I actually found the place, I was half-delirious with exhaustion and fully prepared for disappointment. The track wound past cypress trees and dry stone walls, golden in the late afternoon light, and then suddenly there it was: a proper stone farmhouse, the kind that makes you suspect you've accidentally wandered into a travel brochure. I half-expected a kindly nonna to appear with a plate of still-warm biscotti.

No nonna materialised, but the key was exactly where promised, and pushing open that heavy wooden door felt like stepping through to another century. The smell hit first - that particular dry, woody scent of old stone and wooden beams that's impossible to fake. The floors were terracotta, worn smooth by generations of feet, and the kitchen had one of those vast fireplaces you could practically stand inside. I immediately began planning elaborate meals I'd never actually cook.

I dumped my bags with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who'd genuinely forgotten what sleep felt like and wandered straight out to the terrace. The view stopped me mid-step. Todi proper sat perched on its hill in the distance, all honey-coloured walls and terracotta roofs, looking impossibly picturesque against the darkening sky. Below me, olive groves rolled away in every direction, silver-green in the fading light. Somewhere a dog barked, and then silence. Complete, absolute, slightly unnerving silence. I live near the M25. This felt like being deposited on the moon, if the moon had excellent wine prospects.

I made the rookie error of trying the pool before unpacking. October in Umbria is not, strictly speaking, swimming weather, but after twelve hours of travel and one minor vehicular incident, I wasn't making sensible choices. The water was brisk. Brisk enough that I emerged making noises I didn't know I could produce, then stood dripping and shivering on the terrace like a particularly bedraggled heron. A bat flitted past, probably laughing.

The evening proper brought the kind of darkness you simply don't get at home. No streetlights, no light pollution, just stars and more stars and the distant glow of Todi on its hill. I opened a bottle of local Grechetto I'd picked up at a service station somewhere near Perugia - classily done - and sat wrapped in a blanket that smelled faintly of lavender, watching the last warmth drain from the stone walls around me.

That first night, I slept like the dead in a bedroom with ceiling beams so low I cracked my head twice getting up for the loo. The second time, I actually laughed out loud in the darkness, standing there in my pants, rubbing my skull, surrounded by more history than my entire postcode. There's something humbling about being defeated by architecture.

I woke to mist and church bells, made terrible coffee in the enormous kitchen, and stood barefoot on cold terracotta, watching the valley emerge from grey into gold. The wing mirror sat in the car like a guilty reminder. Todi waited on its hill, patient, ancient, indifferent to my small disasters.

I was already plotting how to return before I'd even properly arrived.