Through the pain of a particularly nasty hangover, I am watching two young men leap around like buffoons. Henry, tall and lean, is bouncing impressively high, while Selwyn, shorter and squatter, is executing army-style star jumps.

There is an awful lot of panting because Henry and Selwyn have stinking hangovers, too.

But this is no fitness break. The rest of us — 15 in all — are lying indolently on the grass outside an Italian baronial mansion, doing nothing more strenuous than depressing the buttons on our cameras.

The previous night, we had stayed up till the small hours, drinking our village hotel dry. We’ve got sore heads.

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I’m on a five-day photography holiday in Abruzzo, Italy, with Frui, the creative holiday specialists. Today we’ve been learning about shutter speeds, which is why Henry and Selwyn have been bounding around like eejits: high speeds will capture them in perfect frozen slow-motion; a low speed will produce stripy, blurred movements.

We’ve just spent the morning exploring part of the Palazzo Baronale di Semivicoli in Chieti, which is being refurbished as a luxury hotel by the Italian winemaker Masciarelli.

But the meddling decorators haven’t sanitised it just yet — and it’s been a strange, visually rich experience.

The 17th-century palace was last inhabited by a wealthy Sicilian family that left for Rome in 1956. What they left behind has barely been touched since: elegant, dusty furniture, family photographs, ornaments and sculptures, rotting paintings and rusting toys.

We fall silent as we wander around abandoned rooms, clicking our shutters, captivated by the detritus of forgotten lives. The dusty light of these shadowy rooms is great for experimenting with camera settings.

But more than that, as one of our tutors, Henry Carroll, impressed upon us in our first lesson, it’s a place where we can clarify what we like looking at; how we feel about the pictures we are taking.

“You have to inject a bit of yourself in your photographs,” he had told us. “How does the image make you feel? How do you want the viewer to see it? That’s how you will establish your photographic ‘voice’.”

That first lesson, conducted around the pool of a lovely rural hotel, the Villa Danilo in Gamberale, was a revelation. It had also trounced a lot of my prejudices about photography courses.

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