I have never been so grateful for a sat nav's robotic patience as I was driving to Ponte San Cono. Three hours out of Naples, already sweating through my shirt despite the air con, and I took what I can only describe as an "optimistic left" down a track that grew narrower with every metre. The olive branches scraped both wing mirrors. A goat watched me pass with what felt like professional judgement. By the time I reversed half a mile back to the proper road, my hire car looked like it had been attacked by an angry hedge. The sat nav simply said "recalculating" in that flat voice, and I swear I heard disappointment.

The proper approach to the property is actually rather lovely, once you find it. Winding through Buccino's outskirts, the road climbs gently past terraces of vines and the occasional crumbling stone wall that has probably been crumbling since before my grandfather was born. I pulled up at Ponte San Cono just as the afternoon sun was turning everything golden and ridiculous, and there was Giuseppe waiting by the gate with two glasses of something cold and fizzy already poured.

Giuseppe manages the place with his sister Rosa, though "manages" feels too corporate for what they do. Within four minutes of arrival I knew about his bad knee from a football injury in 1987, his opinion on Neapolitan pizza (overrated, apparently), and the exact location of the best bakery in Buccino proper. Rosa appeared from somewhere carrying a bowl of cherries from their own tree and immediately corrected him on the bakery. They bickered beautifully, like a comedy double act who had been perfecting their timing for decades.

The property itself sits in that sweet spot between properly rustic and actually comfortable. The pool area looks out over a valley that seems to have been designed specifically to make you feel smug about your holiday choices. But I barely noticed the view at first because Rosa was explaining, with elaborate hand gestures, why I must never buy olive oil from the supermarket in town. "My cousin," she said, pressing a bottle of her own into my hands, "he puts chemicals. Chemicals! In the oil! For colour!" She looked personally offended by this betrayal.

That first evening, Giuseppe insisted on driving me down to Buccino for dinner rather than letting me attempt the roads again. We stopped at a bar where he seemed to know everyone, and I found myself introduced to a group of men playing cards who collectively decided my Italian was "not terrible, for an English person." One of them, Vincenzo, had apparently lived in Luton for six months in 1974 and still considered himself something of an expert on British culture. He asked me about the weather in Manchester with the confidence of a man who had never been north of Watford.

What struck me, sitting there with my beer that cost less than a packet of crisps back home, was how immediately I had been absorbed into something. Not as a tourist exactly, more as a curiosity that people were happy to fold into their evening. Rosa had sent me off with a Tupperware of her pasta sauce. Giuseppe had given me his cousin's phone number for "emergencies, or if you want good cheese." Vincenzo was trying to teach me a card game that seemed to have rules he was making up as he went along.

I thought about my sat nav misery, the scratched car, the goat's withering stare. The anxiety of arrival, of not knowing where you are or whether you've made a terrible mistake. And then I thought about Rosa pressing cherries on me like I might starve otherwise, and Giuseppe's terrible driving advice, and Vincenzo's absolute certainty about Luton. The mishap had become the reason for the conversation, the thing that let me be slightly pathetic and therefore approachable.

By the time Giuseppe dropped me back, the cicadas were going full pelt and the pool was catching moonlight. I sat with Rosa's sauce and some bread and felt genuinely content in a way that had nothing to do with the view or the wine, though both helped. I had arrived, finally. The long way round, scratched and slightly humiliated, but properly there.