I have never been so relieved to see a gravel driveway in all my life. Three hours of winding through the Lazio countryside, my partner navigating with the confidence of someone who once visited Rome in 2008, and we were utterly, magnificently lost. The sat nav had given up somewhere near a field of very judgmental sheep, and I had just insisted we stop to ask directions from an elderly gentleman who turned out to be walking his tortoise. His name was Enzo. The tortoise, I mean. The man was called Bruno, and he looked at our hire car the way one might regard a spaceship.

"Casaprota?" he said, scratching his chin. "Ah, si, si. You follow the road past the olive trees, then past the other olive trees, then you will see more olive trees, and then you are there." He said this with absolute sincerity, as if this were the most precise set of directions ever committed to language. I thanked him profusely. He tipped his cap. Enzo the tortoise blinked at us with what I can only describe as profound indifference.

We found it eventually, of course. The Casaprota sat perched on a gentle slope, all honey-coloured stone and terracotta tiles, with a garden that looked like it had been arranged by someone who understood that beauty requires a certain cheerful disorganisation. Lavender everywhere. A lemon tree that appeared to be staging a minor rebellion against its own branches. And there, waiting by the gate with a bottle of something cold and local, was our host, Federica.

"You are the English couple who got lost by Bruno's tortoise," she said, not as a question. News travels fast in villages of four hundred people. I admitted we were. She laughed, a proper full-bodied thing, and said Bruno had already telephoned her husband, who had telephoned his cousin at the bakery, who had mentioned it to Federica when she popped in for bread. "By tomorrow, everyone will know. This is good. You are already famous."

The house itself was exactly the sort of place that makes you immediately want to become a different, better sort of person. Someone who writes poetry at dawn and knows how to prune vines properly. I stood in the kitchen, running my hand along the worn wooden table, and announced to my partner that I would definitely be learning Italian properly now, perhaps taking up watercolour painting, almost certainly growing my own tomatoes. She reminded me that I had killed a cactus in 2019. I told her that was different, that cactus had it in for me from the start.

Federica showed us round with the particular pride of someone who has restored something herself, pointing out the original beams, the fireplace that had been rebuilt stone by stone, the view from the bedroom window that she described as "not bad" with magnificent understatement. It looked out across rolling hills to a distant village, all terracotta and campaniles, the sort of view that makes you understand why people painted landscapes in the first place.

That evening, we walked down to the village proper, a wander of perhaps ten minutes down a lane that smelled of wild fennel and warm dust. We passed an old woman sitting outside her house, shelling beans into an apron spread across her knees. She looked up, assessed us with the speed of long practice, and declared in Italian that my partner's sandals were "molto pratico" with an expression that suggested she found them anything but. We chatted, or rather she chatted and we nodded and smiled and caught perhaps every third word. She was called Signora Rossi, she had lived in the same house for seventy-two years, and she thought the English were "simpatici but always cold." I was wearing a cardigan in twenty-five degree heat at the time, and could offer no meaningful defence.

We bought bread and wine at the tiny alimentari, where the owner, a man called Marco with spectacular eyebrows, insisted on knowing exactly what we were cooking before he would recommend a particular bottle. "Pasta? With what? No, no, that wine is for meat. You want this one. My brother makes it. He is an idiot, but he understands grapes." We took the wine. We took his brother's wine too, out of solidarity with idiots who understand their craft.

By the time we walked back up to the Casaprota, the light was doing that particular golden thing it does in central Italy, everything soft-edged and slightly unreal. We sat on the terrace with Marco's idiot brother's excellent wine, watching swallows dart about the eaves, and I thought about Bruno and his tortoise, about Signora Rossi's seventy-two years in one house, about Federica rebuilding stone by stone. There is something humbling about places where people stay, where continuity matters, where your getting lost by a tortoise becomes village news by teatime. I am not sure I will learn Italian properly, or paint watercolours, or successfully grow tomatoes. But I think I might understand, now, why someone would want to.