I briefly considered writing a series of guidebooks, or at least one guidebook, for people such as myself: the unambitious tourist. The reason the idea never got off the ground, that it never reached the proposal-writing stage, or even the pitching-it-to-an-agent-or-editor-over-coffee stage, is that I quickly realized it would be a very thin volume.

If one's advice is to ditch all but a few churches and museums and spend most of your time at cafes reading the paper, interrupted by the occasional remorse-free shopping spree, that's really not enough to fill a book. Put another way, my idea of a successful vacation is one where I manage to fit in both morning and afternoon naps. That doesn't make for riveting reading. My entry for the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris might have gone something like this: "Take five minutes to walk around and absorb the somber, gothic majesty of the place, see the rose windows, skip the tower tour—it's too many stairs unless you're a true 'Hunchback' fan—note the flying buttresses on the way out and make a bee-line across the Seine to the Left Bank for the café in the Place Saint-Sulpice where the hot dog on a baguette is very good and the people-watching is excellent."

The often-visited pool. Ralph Gardner

I realize that if you're visiting a great city for the first time there's lots of pressure to see as much as possible, and even substantial guilt at the idea of not. This is not only for your personal edification, but also so that when you get home and your friends ask whether you saw the Caravaggios in Rome's Church of San Luigi dei Francesi (not that our friends are sufficiently pretentious, except for one or two, that they ever would), you can nod your head sagely.

But I think I've figured out a way to assuage the guilt and relieve the pressure: Simply tell yourself you'll eventually be back. There's no need to pack everything into one trip.

Another tactic to avoid expending wasteful energy and money—especially when spouses, children and friends are agitating to summit the Eiffel Tower or take every last ride in the Tivoli Gardens—is to persuade yourself, and them, that you're all getting a much better appreciation for the local culture by sitting in a park among the retirees while checking your email than you would be standing on a two-hour line waiting to see the Sistine Chapel.

And, finally, there's a third, nearly foolproof, way to maximize the relaxation process, whether at home or abroad. That's to go someplace where there's nothing to do; someplace that's so out of the way there are no Da Vincis or Michelangelos demanding your attention, no natural gorges or scenic grottos or Grand Canyons that all the guidebooks, and your best friends who visited last summer, insist you must see.

By those parameters, I may be returning from the best, most unaccomplished vacation ever. It was to Marche, also known as the Marches. It's a part of Italy to the east of both Tuscany and Umbria, and more laid back than either by several multiples. Go any farther east and you hit the Adriatic Sea.

As I said, it wasn't near anything—no disrespect to the locals, their ancient hill towns twinkling like tiny versions of Oz come dusk. In between were fields filled with sunflowers, vineyards, olive groves and other crops laid down like carpeting in pleasing geometric patterns. I don't think I saw or heard a single American the whole time we were there. Then again, we didn't leave the house much.

The weather had something to do with it. We visited during the hottest week of the summer, the temperature reaching 100 degrees several days in a row. But it was dry heat, my Weather Channel app informing me it felt a mere 95.

One of the sunflower-filled fields Ralph Gardner

My wife would have preferred it a dozen degrees cooler. But then we'd have felt an obligation to get in the car and go do something. Instead, the whole family read. And read. Here's pretty much how an average day went: We'd get up in the morning, dive into the pool, find some shade and read until breakfast.

By the time breakfast was over, we were ready for another swim and more reading. Mogliano, the closest town, gave us the wrong impression when we visited our first evening. It was in the throes of a street fair, and as we waited for our pizza at the only restaurant on the piazza, the sound system crackled to life and seemingly everybody under 30 started dancing in formation to Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream."

I thought it was a flash mob. My wife claims, based upon what information or intuition I don't know, that the performance was orchestrated by the local dance instructor, and that these were her students. Whatever they were, it marked the apex of the week's excitement—the town, except for the supermarket, pretty much closed down when we returned to provision the next morning.

But an excellent, fully stocked supermarket it was. In my mythological underachiever's guidebook, I might include sidebars for the best grocery stores. Next to cafes, there's no better place to get a sense of local life. They certainly seem better attended than the churches. And waiting your turn at the deli counter to buy fresh rolls, thinly sliced prosciutto and mozzarella di bufala will probably bring you as close to feeling a native as you're likely to get, unless you're invited to someone's home.

That didn't happen to us, though on a rare midday jaunt to the nearby town of Montegiorgio the caretaker of the locked Church of San Francesco arrived as we were departing, motioned us inside and proudly gave us a tour of the chapel's 15th-century frescos and antique organ.

That excursion largely exempted us from any further responsibilities regarding the acquisition of culture. With the exception of an evening trip for dinner to Macerata, a small, elegant, medieval city nearby, most of our days were spent submerged and our evenings grilling and drinking the good and remarkably cheap local wine.

It was on childhood summer vacations such as this that I discovered Steinbeck and Hemingway, and more important than either of them the enchantment of literature without distractions. This year's journey will be remembered as much for Patti Smith's memoir "Just Kids" and Junot Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" as for any tourist hot spots—the constant chorus of crickets and an occasional tractor laboring to get a nearby field plowed before the temperature soared only serving to better frame one's focus.


Corrections & Amplifications
In an earlier version of this article, the Place Saint-Sulpice was misspelled Saint-Suplice.