I have never been so relieved to see a goat in my entire life. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The drive from Lamezia Terme airport to Joppolo was supposed to take ninety minutes. It took nearly three hours, thanks to me misreading the hire car's sat nav and sending us up a road that grew narrower and more apologetic with every bend until it simply gave up and became a dirt track. My partner, who had been dozing, woke up just as I was reversing past a small vineyard with the grace of a shopping trolley in a strong wind. She looked at me. I looked at the vineyard. A goat looked at both of us with what I can only describe as seasoned disappointment.

We finally found the right turning, a steep lane leading down to a cluster of pastel houses clinging to the Calabrian hillside like they had been flung there by an enthusiastic child. The property, a modest apartment in a converted stone building, sat above the Tyrrhenian Sea with a terrace that made me forget entirely about the goat incident. Almost.

Our neighbour was the first local we met. Maria, seventy-something, appeared over the low wall between our terraces before I had even unpacked the tea bags. She spoke no English. I speak Italian with the fluency of a confused toddler. Between us we established that I was English, that she thought this was hilarious, and that her nephew worked in Bedford for reasons neither of us could adequately explain. She pressed two lemons into my hands, grown on her own tree, and told me through elaborate gestures that the British do not know what a real lemon is. I did not argue. The lemons were the size of my fist.

That evening we walked down to the village for dinner, a stumble along cobbled paths where every third person seemed to know Maria and therefore felt entitled to assess us. At a tiny trattoria with three tables and no menu, the owner, a man called Gino with eyebrows like hedgerows, decided what we would eat and how long we would take to eat it. He was not asking. When I attempted to order wine, he held up one finger and brought us something local, cloudy, and extraordinary. "You drink this," he said, in the manner of a doctor prescribing essential medicine. We drank it.

The conversation at the next table drew us in despite ourselves. Three men in their sixties, playing cards with the intensity of Olympic athletes, argued about football, fishing, and whether someone called Antonio had paid for his own funeral yet. This last point caused enormous amusement. One of them, Enzo, turned to me and asked in slow, patient Italian whether I understood death. I said I was still working on it. He found this so funny he bought us a digestif I cannot name and would not wish to drink again, though I did so gratefully.

By the second day, Maria had introduced us to her sister, who lived two doors down and communicated exclusively through a window, never leaving her kitchen. She sold us homemade jarred olives through this window, passing them down in a basket on a rope, and accepted payment the same way. I felt like I had stumbled into a folk tale. When I asked Maria why her sister never came out, Maria shrugged with the completeness of someone who has never found the question interesting enough to consider. "She likes the window," she said. This seemed to settle it.

The baker, we discovered, opened only when he felt like it, which was rarely before ten and never without a cigarette in his mouth. He spoke to his bread more than to his customers, addressing each loaf as it came from the oven with what sounded like encouragement or mild criticism. I bought a ciabatta that was still singing, he claimed, though I suspect my translation was imperfect. It tasted, in any case, like bread that had been properly attended to.

What struck me most, I think, was how little anyone hurried and how little they seemed to mind our presence once the basic questions had been answered. We were not tourists to be entertained or extracted from. We were simply there, and that was enough. A man called Salvatore, who repaired fishing nets on a wall near the harbour, talked to me for twenty minutes about the difference between sardines and anchovies without once checking whether I was following. I was not, mostly. It did not matter to either of us.

On our last morning, Maria brought us more lemons and a jar of her preserved figs. She told me, through a combination of pointing and exaggerated facial expressions, that my Italian was terrible but my face was honest, which she considered more important. I have kept the jar. It sits in my kitchen in Manchester, where the figs look slightly confused about their new circumstances, much as I must have looked in Joppolo.

I think about that goat sometimes. The way it watched me reverse past the vineyard with the patience of something that had seen human foolishness many times before and expected to see it again. It was right, of course. I would make exactly the same wrong turn tomorrow if it meant arriving somewhere that felt, for a few days, like being accepted into a story already in progress, rather than starting one of my own.