I have never been so relieved to see a gravel driveway in all my life. Three hours earlier, I had been cheerfully telling myself that driving from Venice to Friuli would be "a doddle," which just goes to show what happens when you let someone who once got lost in a Sainsbury's car park navigate rural Italy.

The mishap came just outside Udine, where I took what I firmly believed was a shortcut. It was not a shortcut. It was a road that grew narrower and more philosophical with every metre, until I found myself wedged between a tractor the size of a bungalow and a stone wall that had probably witnessed the Napoleonic Wars. The tractor driver, a chap called Nino with eyebrows like hedgerows, did not look surprised to see me. He looked like he saw Englishmen in hatchbacks every Tuesday. Through a series of elaborate hand gestures and what I now realise was him simply repeating "indietro" with increasing volume, I reversed half a kilometre until I found somewhere to turn. I waved apologetically. Nino lit a cigarette and watched, entirely unhurried, as if this were better than television.

By the time I crunched onto the gravel at Villa Santina, I was forty minutes late, slightly hysterical, and in urgent need of something alcoholic. Elena, who manages the property, was waiting on the terrace with two glasses and a expression of practised patience. She did not mention my lateness. She simply handed me a glass of something golden and said, "Nino telephoned. He said you were coming." The Friuli grapevine, it turns out, operates faster than broadband.

The villa itself was one of those proper stone houses that looks like it has been there since before people started counting years, with wooden shutters that actually function and a garden that smelled of rosemary and something else I could not identify. Elena showed me round with the brisk efficiency of someone who has done this a thousand times but still takes pleasure in it. She kept pausing to correct my pronunciation of local place names, not unkindly, the way you might guide a toddler through a difficult word. "Cividale," she would say, waiting. "Chee-vee-DAH-lay." I would repeat it. She would wince, very slightly, and move on.

That evening I walked down to the village, if you can call a handful of houses and a bar a village. The bar was called Al Posto, and it was run by a woman called Paola who had the build of a rugby prop forward and the memory of a concert pianist. She remembered everyone's drink, everyone's business, and everyone's grandmother's medical history. I ordered a beer and attempted to explain, in my theatrical GCSE Italian, that I had got lost that afternoon. She listened with her head tilted, then turned to the three old men playing cards in the corner and delivered what was clearly a full translation, complete with sound effects. They laughed for a solid minute. One of them, Renzo, shuffled over with his cane and informed me, through Paola's interpretation, that Nino's tractor had been stuck in that same spot in 1987 and he had had to winch him out with his Fiat Panda. This was apparently the height of local comedy. I bought them all a round. It seemed only fair.

What struck me, that first night, was how immediately I had become a story rather than a stranger. By morning, I suspected, half the valley would know about the Englishman in the blue car who could not reverse properly. There was something rather comforting in it, this gentle, unhurried surveillance. Back home I might have felt exposed, but here it felt like being folded into something, even if I was the punchline.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of distant church bells and what I choose to believe was Nino's tractor, rumbling home through the dark, probably already composing tomorrow's version of my arrival.