I should have known the Sat Nav was plotting against me the moment it sent us down a track that grew narrower than my patience. Three hours from Venice Marco Polo, full of airport coffee and misplaced confidence, and there we were: wedged between an olive grove and what I initially mistook for a very committed hedge, but was in fact a local farmer's Fiat Panda, parked with the casual abandon of someone who has never once doubted their right to exist anywhere they please.

The farmer himself emerged from the trees carrying pruning shears and an expression of profound curiosity. "Lauco?" he said, before I'd even wound down the window fully. Not a question, more a diagnosis. I nodded. He pointed the shears vaguely upward, toward where the village clings to the hillside like it might slide off if it stopped concentrating. "Sempre dritto," he said. Always straight on. This proved technically accurate in the same way that "keep going" helps when you're already lost.

We found it eventually, of course. The house sits where the road runs out of enthusiasm, a solid stone affair with wooden shutters that have witnessed several centuries of comings and goings. Our host, Gabriella, appeared from round the side carrying a basket of walnuts and wearing wellies that had definitely seen proper agricultural service. She took in our dusty hire car, my partner's expression of quiet trauma, and my own attempt at cheerful nonchalance with the practiced eye of someone who has met every possible version of arriving tourist.

"Venice airport?" she asked. We nodded. "The Sat Nav?" Another nod. She made a small clicking sound with her tongue that conveyed more about technology's relationship with these mountains than any rant could have managed.

Gabriella showed us round with the unhurried pace of someone for whom time operates differently. The kitchen with its wood-burning stove. The terrace where she said we'd want to sit with morning coffee, and she said this not as a suggestion but as a simple fact she had observed repeatedly. The bedrooms with their heavy blankets, unnecessary in September but reassuring somehow.

Then came the neighbours. Or rather, then came our introduction to the rhythm of neighbourly observation that defines village life here. A woman called Luisa appeared from the house below, ostensibly to retrieve her cat, though the cat seemed perfectly capable and the conversation that followed suggested other motivations. She spoke rapid Friulian that Gabriella translated in fragments, something about the walnuts being early this year, something else about an English couple who'd stayed in the house in 1987 and never got the hang of the stove.

"She remembers everyone," Gabriella said, not unkindly, as Luisa retreated with her cat and what I suspect was sufficient intelligence to report back to whoever else might be interested.

That evening, as the light did something extraordinary to the mountains across the valley, we sat on the terrace with wine Gabriella had left us and the quiet that comes when you've finally stopped moving. I found myself thinking about Luisa's memory, about Gabriella's wellies, about the farmer with his shears who had simply accepted our confusion as a natural weather pattern. There is something humbling about arriving somewhere that has functioned without your presence for so long, that will continue in its patterns regardless of your understanding. I had packed guidebooks and plans. What I needed, apparently, was patience and a willingness to be slightly ridiculous.

The Sat Nav never recovered, by the way. We used it as a paperweight for the rest of the week, which felt like the appropriate career change.