Lovely Sirente

Whitewashed barrel vaults, terracotta floors, wrought-iron bedsteads. It is a family house, with everything in its place for a long time now, and it has the character new buildings cannot manufacture.

The fireplace is the real thing. On a winter evening you light it, and it becomes the room everyone drifts into without having agreed to.

The masonry kitchen is big enough that ten people actually cook — which is half the reason you take a house instead of five hotel rooms. There is independent heating, a washing machine, wi-fi, and a table for whoever has to work even on holiday.

Four bedrooms, six beds. We work out who sleeps where when you book: with ten people it is always the first question, and the answer depends on who you are.

The garden has a timber pergola with a long table, and the barbecue beside it. In summer that is where the day ends: you eat outside, you stay out late, and the mountain air does the rest.

From the terrace you can see Monte Sirente — with snow along the ridge in winter, which is where the house gets its name.

Rocca Calascio, forty-seven kilometres away, is the most photographed castle in Abruzzo: on a ridge at fourteen hundred metres, with the view everyone has already seen without knowing where it was. Santo Stefano di Sessanio, a stone village rebuilt stone by stone, is fifty.

Sulmona is twenty kilometres out and it is the nearest real town: sugared almonds, an old centre, the market in Piazza Garibaldi under the arches of the medieval aqueduct. It is also where you shop when there are ten of you.

The sea at Pescara is seventy-nine kilometres away. In a week it fits: a day at the coast and back to the mountains the next morning.

The Sirente-Velino regional park begins more or less at the front door. The paths climb into beech woods, and in October and November those woods are reason enough to come at all: you walk for hours inside a yellow forest without meeting anyone.

Le Pagliare di Tione, twenty kilometres away, is a high stone settlement — the houses used during the summer grazing season, reached on foot today and still standing there, intact and empty.

The nearest lifts are Ovindoli and Campo Felice, both an easy day out. You leave in the morning with the skis and come back to the fireplace in the afternoon, which is a way of skiing that hotels up at the resorts cannot offer.

And on the days you do not ski, you look at the snow on the Sirente from the terrace with a coffee in your hand.

No surcharge, no raised eyebrows. There is a garden, the woods start a few hundred metres away, and there is no carpet to protect. If you travel with a dog and you are tired of filtering listings, here the answer is yes.

You need a car: Castelvecchio Subequo is not served by useful public transport, and nearly everything worth seeing is within half an hour's drive. Two parking spaces are included.

The garden, the pergola and the barbecue are shared with the owners, who may stay in the flat below.