Serenity is in Burlington.

It's true. A Vanity Fair journalist discovered it there.

After an exhaustive search that almost brought New York-based Nick Tosches to his knees, sifting through sources from Lake Como in Italy to Colborne, Ont., in Southern Ontario, he finally found what he was looking for.

Turns out the leaf-littered lane that stole his heart one afternoon when he first glimpsed it on his computer – it's the default desktop wallpaper in Microsoft's XP operating system – is just west of Toronto in the Burlington suburb of Kilbride.

"It was insane," Tosches says. "Something that would appear very simple at first probably turned out to be one of the most difficult searches of my life."

It took Tosches just over a year to pinpoint the exact location of calm – actually a photograph called Autumn that popped up on his computer screen after a tech-nerd configured his new machine.

An experienced investigator, who once conned the Vatican into giving him a doctorate so he could gain access to hidden archives, Tosches, 58, was confident he'd find the object of his desire.

He documented his search in a recent article published in Vanity Fair online.

"I was so absorbed by that picture," he says. "Autumn is my favourite time of year. I got lost in it. I figured I'd just ask Microsoft where it is."

He made hundreds of queries to Microsoft, public relations agents, inn owners, horse farmers, realtors, small-town librarians and tourism departments of various countries.

Tosches wrote emails, made countless phone calls and followed up on "feelings" he had that placed the scene in horse-friendly states, such as Vermont.

"Fifteen years ago, we had telephone, postal system, the library. ... It seemed easy to get information," he says, musing about the time he spent searching.

"Now we have huge, intertwined, monolithic conglomerations with all their wires tangled. I did have the feeling of congestion. It really doesn't make things easier."

Stymied at every turn, Tosches painstakingly sifted through 5,000 photographs in a database labelled Autumn, praying to find a match.

He did. But unlike the other pictures in the Corbis database, a library with more than 70 million images for sale, it didn't contain pertinent, locating info.

Then he got an email from Microsoft placing the scene in Campbellville, Ont. But, it was a false lead.

Fortunately, and probably by "magic," a Vanity Fair researcher was able to track down the name of Autumn's photographer. Peter Burian shot the picture along with hundreds of frames in October 1999 while he was testing lenses for a photography trade magazine. He sent it to Corbis, where Microsoft probably purchased it for $300. Burian's cut was $45.

The Milton man says it was a treat to get Tosches's call.

"I was more shocked to find out that one of my photographs is available to hundreds of millions of people," he says. "I didn't think anything of it when I took it."

The lane in the picture leads to an unspectacular farmhouse once owned by the Harris family, one of the first settlers in the area, Burian says.

Tosches says he's going to see it with his own eyes. He's hoping to make the trip sometime this year. "I know where it is now and it's not going anywhere."