I have never been quite so grateful for a cup of hot chocolate in all my life, and that includes the time I spilled an entire Starbucks down my front on a first date. The drive up to Sovramonte had been spectacular, winding through the Dolomites with jagged limestone peaks catching the afternoon light like some dramatic stage set, but it had also been three hours of me gripping the steering wheel and muttering "not the edge, not the edge" every time we rounded another hairpin bend.

The mishap came right at the end, naturally, when we were practically in sight of the place. I had stopped to let a tractor pass on the narrow lane, and in my eagerness to be helpful and wave him through with what I thought was a cheery gesture, I managed to knock the handbrake somehow. The car rolled gently, almost gracefully, into a drainage ditch. Just far enough that the back wheels spun uselessly. Just far enough that I had to knock on a stranger's door and attempt to explain myself in GCSE Italian.

The stranger was Renzo, seventy-ish, wearing a flat cap that looked older than me and a pair of gardening trousers held up by what I can only describe as optimism and a fraying belt. He did not seem surprised to find a British woman standing in his yard with a car in a ditch. He looked, if anything, faintly amused. "Ahhh," he said, drawing the sound out like a medical diagnosis. "Inglese." This apparently explained everything.

Within minutes he had produced a rope from somewhere, whistled up his neighbour Carlo, and the two of them had my little hire car back on the tarmac with the efficient teamwork of men who have spent decades rescuing tourists from their own incompetence. I tried to offer money. Renzo waved it away with genuine offence, then immediately asked if I liked grappa. It was ten past four in the afternoon.

Which is how I ended up sitting in Renzo's kitchen twenty minutes later, still slightly trembling, drinking something that stripped several layers off my throat and watching his wife, Luisa, roll her eyes with the practised weariness of a woman who has seen this routine many times before. "He collects people," she told me, in surprisingly good English. "Like stamps. You are now in his album." She said this with evident affection, and also with the subtle warning that I would be expected to visit again before I left.

The property itself, when I finally reached it, was one of those solid mountain houses that looks like it has grown directly out of the hillside. Stone walls nearly a metre thick, wooden balconies with flower boxes still clinging to the last geraniums of autumn, and a view that made me actually say "oh" out loud, which I never do. The key was in a lockbox, the instructions were in four languages, and the heating was already on, which I discovered when I pressed my face against a radiator like a grateful cat.

I had intended to unpack properly, to organise myself, to be the sort of person who immediately hangs clothes and arranges toiletries. Instead I stood on the balcony with a cup of tea that tasted slightly of grappa still, watching the light change on the mountains and feeling something unknot in my chest that I had not realised was tied so tightly. The quiet was not empty; it was full of small sounds, distant cow bells, a stream somewhere below, the creak of what I later learned was a wooden hay barn shifting in the cooling air.

That evening I walked down to the village proper, which took all of seven minutes, and found myself drawn to a small bar with a single light on and voices spilling out. I told myself I was looking for dinner, but really I was looking for company, for the warmth of other humans after a day of driving and ditches and unexpected kindness. The barman was young, perhaps twenty-five, with a beard he was clearly proud of and an apron that announced him as Matteo. He looked at me with the quick assessment of someone who knows exactly who is local and who is not.

"Renzo's English," he said, before I had ordered. News travels in villages like this with the speed of something much faster than modern communication. I asked how he knew. He shrugged, smiled, poured me a local beer without asking. "He telephoned. To say you are coming. Also to say you drink grappa like a student, but he likes you anyway."

I found a corner table and ate something involving speck and polenta that arrived without me fully understanding what I had ordered. An older woman at the next table, introduced simply as Signora Fiorini by Matteo with what seemed like deliberate vagueness, asked me about my journey and listened to the story of the ditch with the solemn attention of someone hearing a great tragedy, then laughed for a solid minute with her hand pressed to her chest. "Renzo," she said, as if this single word contained volumes. "Always the rope. Always the grappa. Always the telephone after." She made it sound like a ritual, which I suppose it was.

By the time I walked back up to Sovramonte, slightly full of beer and mountain air and the particular contentment of having been laughed at kindly, the stars had come out with an intensity that made me stop in the lane and just look upward. I thought about Renzo and Luisa and their kitchen that smelled of wood smoke and coffee. I thought about Signora Fiorini's theatrical sympathy and Matteo's easy inclusion of a stranger in his evening's routine. I thought about how I had arrived planning to walk and photograph and tick off scenic viewpoints, and how instead I had spent my first day being slightly ridiculous and being forgiven for it immediately.

The house was warm when I let myself in. I did not unpack properly even then. I sat in the dark on that balcony, wrapped in a blanket I found in a cupboard, and watched the mountains become shapes against slightly less dark sky until I was too cold to stay out any longer. Somewhere a dog barked once and was answered from further away. The stream kept its constant conversation with the stones. I went to bed smiling, already wondering what Renzo might collect me for next, and whether I would ever manage to drink grappa without my eyes watering. I suspected not, and suspected equally that this would not matter at all.