When the Light Turns Gold: Choosing Your Month

The villa is open from the middle of March to the middle of November, and the eight months are genuinely different from one another. Here is what we tell friends.

March and April are green, wet and empty. The hills are the colour they only manage for a few weeks, there is nobody on the roads, and the rates are the lowest of the year. You will want a jacket in the evening and the pool is not open. If you are here to walk and eat rather than swim, it is arguably the best value in the calendar.

September is the month we would book if we were guests.

May and June are the postcard months. Long light, wildflowers on the terraces, warm afternoons and cool nights. They are also the months that book first, generally six to nine months out for weekends. If you want the Terrace Loft in June, ask early.

July and August are hot, often thirty-five degrees by two in the afternoon, and the rhythm of the day shifts accordingly: early mornings, long slow middles, late dinners. The house handles it better than most, with metre-thick walls and shade over the pergola from eleven, but it is not the month for ambitious drives. It is a wonderful month for families, because children do not care about the heat and the pool solves everything.

September is our own answer. The heat softens, the light lengthens, the crowds thin out after the first week, the grape harvest is on in the surrounding vineyards and the water in the pool is still warm from August. October brings the olive harvest and the first fires in the sitting room, and by the middle of November we close, sweep the terraces and start again.