Adventures in house-hunting: a writer chronicles her attempt to find the perfect home in Italy. Maybe it was the 5 million euro house. Maybe it was the swarms of cycling tours. Maybe it was just the sense that the gods had other plans for me. But whatever the reason, it was time to say arrivederci to the Val d'Orcia. I went north, to the Ligurian beach town of Lerici. But I only lasted about 20 minutes on the Italian Riviera before I realized: this place is too tan, too oily, too hair-gelled for me. If we got a house here, my daughter would be wearing a thong to swim class. My son would be unbuttoning his shirt down to the waist before his second birthday. We're not this slick, so we slid right out of town and headed directly inland from La Spezia. We drove past an unpronounceable town called Aulla and past a very-fun-to-pronounce town called Fivizzano. Up into the hills, deep into the countryside, we drove for close to an hour. That's how you get to a fleck of a town called Cotto. Cotto means "cooked" in Italian. It's a funny name for a town that has no restaurant, no bar and no grocery store. In fact, unless you bring it in from somewhere else, there is nothing to have "cotto-ed" in all of Cotto. Technically, Cotto is a town, but if you need a gas station, post office or infrastructure of any kind, Cotto is not the town for you. There is nothing here beside a dozen charming old buildings and their charming old owners - tucked into the hilltops of northern Tuscany. The place is beautiful, woody, serene and remarkably undiscovered, given its proximity to the Riviera. Then again, maybe tourists already discovered it but decided they wanted to eat meals on their vacations instead. However it got that way, Cotto is as unexplored a Tuscan town as exists. A series of happy accidents led me to Merrion Charles, a British expat who works as a luxury travel agent and has lived in Cotto for years. Merrion is charming, resourceful and knows the area inside out. And best of all, Merrion had a house to show me. O.K., "house" might be overselling it. It was an old stone structure missing its walls, with a ground floor that had turned to rubble and a spectacular view. It was exactly what I had envisioned when I started my quest for a pile of rocks. It even had a few chickens pecking around the front door. The entrance hall was - once upon a time - very grand, with a sweeping staircase and double-height ceilings. The windows all had an impressive view of the forest below. There were three bedrooms, but since there were no real walls left, that distinction felt somewhat meaningless. Then there was the price: 35,000 euros. I didn't have to Google that one into dollars to know it was fantastically affordable. Maybe too affordable. My long-sought-after pile of rocks had no land. The house was surrounded by acres and fields and greenery, but the children would have to trespass to frolic. Plus where would the pool go? And then there was the second problem: Even though this was Tuscany, even though this was gorgeous, even though the olive trees here were as silvery as they were anywhere else, there was something about Cotto that was too quiet. Too remote. Too far away. So to recap: Pienza was too expensive. Liguria was too tan. And Cotto was too quiet. I really am starting to have a whole new sympathy for Goldilocks.