I have never been so grateful for a sat nav's patronising tone as I was when it announced, "You have reached your destination," and I found myself staring at what appeared to be a goat shed. The goat, I should add, looked equally surprised. It took ten minutes of increasingly frantic reversing, one minor argument with a particularly thorny bush, and a helpful wave from an elderly gentleman in a flat cap before I realised the actual Gradoli was fifty metres further up the gravel track, hidden behind a clutch of cypress trees like a bashful celebrity.

The property itself, when I finally located it, was properly lovely. A solid stone farmhouse with terracotta roof tiles that had clearly seen off several decades of Italian summers, plus a small pool that caught the afternoon light in that way that makes you immediately want to do absolutely nothing for several hours. I was still standing there with my door half open, one foot on the gravel, when a voice called out from the neighbouring garden.

"Brava! You found it! The last people, they drive into the olive tree!" This was Antonella, my immediate neighbour, a woman of perhaps seventy with the energy of someone twenty years younger and an apron that suggested she had been making something involving tomatoes since approximately dawn. She appeared to have no intention of introducing herself formally, instead launching straight into a detailed critique of my parking ("A little more left, no, your other left, there, bellissima") and an invitation to coffee that felt more like a command than a suggestion.

Her kitchen, which I saw roughly eight minutes after first hearing her voice, was a marvel of organised chaos. Dried chillies hung in bunches from the ceiling, a radio played something operatic at a volume that suggested partial deafness, and a cat of indeterminate age watched me with the focused suspicion of a border guard. Antonella's husband, Franco, emerged from somewhere carrying a bottle of homemade wine and an expression of long-suffering patience. He spoke perhaps twenty words of English, all of them apparently learned from Western films, which led to a conversation where he greeted everything I said with either "Howdy" or a thoughtful "Hmm, sheriff."

The coffee was excellent, incidentally. Thick and bitter and served in tiny cups that Antonella refilled with mechanical efficiency whenever I made the mistake of finishing one. By my third, I had learned about her daughter in Rome ("too busy, always too busy"), her opinions on British cooking ("you try, I know you try"), and the precise location of the best butcher in Gradoli proper, which she described with the reverence most people reserve for religious pilgrimage.

Franco, meanwhile, had produced a map and was attempting to explain local walking routes using exclusively hand gestures and the occasional "sheriff." His system involved pointing vigorously at various hills, making walking motions with his fingers, and then either smiling or frowning depending on whether he thought I looked fit enough to manage it. When I pointed to a particularly steep-looking contour line and raised my eyebrows, he simply said "Howdy" with a worrying finality.

I was rescued from further caffeine consumption by the arrival of the property's caretaker, a man called Marco who appeared to be in his thirties and dressed with the casual practicality of someone who spent most of his time fixing things in hot weather. He had come to show me the boiler, apparently, though this quickly expanded into a tour of every switch, valve, and fuse box in the building, each accompanied by increasingly elaborate warnings about what I absolutely must not touch under any circumstances.

"The hot water, she is... temperamental," he said, with the air of someone discussing a difficult relative. "You ask her nicely, maybe she comes. You demand, she refuses. Like my mother." He laughed at his own joke with the relaxed ease of someone who had made it many times before, then spent five minutes demonstrating the exact angle at which the shower handle needed to be positioned to achieve something approaching warmth, a process that involved him getting actually into the shower fully clothed to show me.

By the time he left, the sun had dropped low enough to turn the surrounding hills that particular golden colour that makes the Lazio countryside look like it has been subtly filtered for maximum Instagram appeal. I found a chair on the terrace, opened Franco's wine, and listened to Antonella's radio still faintly audible next door, now playing something that might have been ABBA. A small lizard appeared on the wall nearby, regarded me with the blank indifference of local wildlife everywhere, and disappeared into a crack.

I thought about the journey, the goat, the olive tree that had apparently claimed previous victims. I thought about how I had arrived with a mental image of peaceful rural solitude and had instead been immediately absorbed into something more like a slightly chaotic extended family. It was not what I had expected. It was, I suspected as the wine went down rather too easily, probably going to be considerably better.