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 had definitely not mixed up "Configni" with a village twenty miles north, and there it was: a honey-coloured farmhouse with a slightly crooked terracotta roof and a cat that looked like it had been expecting us since Tuesday.

The mishap, you ask? Oh, that came earlier. Somewhere near Viterbo, convinced by my own terrible Italian that I had brilliantly negotiated a shortcut, I directed us down what I can only describe as a goat's idea of a road. Twenty minutes of white-knuckled progress later, we met the goat in question. It was standing on a wall, judging us. My partner said nothing. He did not need to. The silence was fluent.

By the time we reached Configni, I had promised to never again trust my GCSE Italian, my phone's GPS, or apparently my own eyesight. The property sat there like a patient old friend, all warm stone and wooden shutters that had softened to the colour of strong tea. A wisteria had gone absolutely feral up one wall, and somewhere in the garden, a chicken made a noise like a rusty door hinge.

The door opened before we could knock.

"Brigitta," she announced, though whether this was her name or a general state of being remained unclear. She was perhaps seventy, dressed in trousers that had clearly started life as something else, and she shook my hand with the grip of a woman who still hand-washes her own rugs. Her English was approximately twelve words, deployed with devastating precision. "You," she said, pointing at me. "Lost." Not a question. A diagnosis.

She led us through to the kitchen, where her husband sat at a table covered in walnut shells. He looked up, nodded once, and returned to his work. "Giuseppe," Brigitta said, by way of introduction. Giuseppe said nothing. He did, however, slide a bowl of shelled walnuts towards us with the solemnity of a man performing communion.

"Eat," Brigitta commanded. "You look tired. Lost people look tired."

We ate. The walnuts were extraordinary, oily and bitter and nothing like the sad papery things from supermarkets back home. Giuseppe watched us with one eye, the other apparently reserved for his shelling. After several minutes of this surveillance, he spoke. "Your car," he said. "Small." Another diagnosis. "Road to here. Bad for small cars." He made a sound like a chassis disintegrating. I laughed, too loudly. Giuseppe did not laugh. He shelled another walnut and slid it across.

Brigitta, meanwhile, had produced a map drawn on what appeared to be the back of a flour packet. She jabbed at various locations with a fingernail that had seen honest labour. "Here. Olive oil. Good." Jab. "Here. My sister. Talks too much." Jab. "Here. You got lost." She looked at me with something between pity and amusement. "Tomorrow, I show you. Not get lost."

I opened my mouth to explain that I was actually quite competent, that the goat road had been an anomaly, that I had successfully navigated the M25 on multiple occasions. Brigitta patted my arm in a way that suggested she had heard this before, from many lost people, in many languages.

That evening, sitting on the terrace with a bottle of local Cesanese that Giuseppe had produced from somewhere mysterious, my partner finally spoke. "She's going to adopt you," he said. "Or possibly put you to work. I genuinely cannot tell."

The sun went down over the olive groves, and somewhere in the village below, a dog barked at something only it could see. I thought about Brigitta and her twelve words, Giuseppe and his walnut surveillance, the cat that had followed us inside and now sat on my lap with the settled weight of property ownership. I had arrived convinced I was renting a house. It was becoming apparent that I had actually been collected.

The next morning, Brigitta appeared at eight precisely, carrying eggs still warm from the chicken. She looked at my face, at my obvious exhaustion from a night of unfamiliar silence and too much wine, and she smiled. "Today," she said, "you learn the road. No more lost." She said it with the certainty of prophecy. And standing there in my pyjamas, holding eggs I had not asked for, I believed her completely.