I have never been so grateful for a sat nav's complete and utter betrayal as I was driving to our Bagnoregio holiday let last September. There I was, confidently following a road that grew narrower, then steeper, then apparently vertical, until I found myself wedged between two stone walls in a village so small it did not even appear to have a name. A man emerged from a doorway holding a chicken. He looked at me. I looked at him. The chicken looked at both of us with the weary resignation of someone who had witnessed this scene many times before.

"Bagnoregio?" I asked, rolling down my window.

He pointed back the way I had come, then made a gesture that I can only describe as theatrical despair. "Tourists," he said, though not unkindly. Then he walked back inside, still holding the chicken, and I reversed for what felt like three miles of blind terror.

When I finally found the proper road and pulled up to our stone cottage on the outskirts of Bagnoregio proper, I was already on first-name terms with half the local population. The property manager, a formidable woman named Luisa who wore reading glasses on a chain and carried a clipboard like a weapon, was waiting on the terrace with a bottle of chilled white wine and the expression of someone who had been watching my wrong turns through binoculars.

"Ah, the Englishman with the small car and large problems," she said, pouring me a generous glass. "Come. I introduce you to everyone before you destroy someone's olive grove."

That first evening became a masterclass in the art of the Lazio welcome. Luisa marched me through the neighbouring properties like a general inspecting troops. There was Vittorio, her brother, who grew tomatoes in a greenhouse he had built from salvaged doors and sheer stubbornness. He insisted I taste one immediately, wiping it on his shirt first, and became genuinely offended when I tried to decline. "You think my shirt is dirty?" he demanded. "This shirt is cleaner than your kitchen, probably." I ate the tomato. It was extraordinary. I told him so. He shrugged and immediately offered me seven more.

Next door lived Signora Ferretti, who must have been eighty and spent every evening on her balcony, apparently conducting surveillance on the entire valley. She spoke no English but possessed the universal language of dramatic gestures and knowing exactly what you had done wrong. Within minutes she had established that I was unmarried, childless, and driving a car she considered insultingly small. She communicated this through a series of pointed questions delivered to Luisa, who translated with evident enjoyment, and concluded by pressing a jar of honey into my hands with the stern instruction that I find a wife before it ran out.

The honey, incidentally, came from her own bees. I know this because she gestured extensively toward a hillside where, she claimed, the bees recognised her personally and would never dream of stinging her. Luisa confided later that Signora Ferretti had been hospitalised twice. "But she is proud," Luisa said. "The bees are her family. Her actual family moved to Rome. This is maybe why she talks to insects."

By the time darkness fell I had accumulated three jars of preserved goods, one incorrect route to a restaurant that had closed in 2019, and an invitation to Vittorio's greenhouse the following morning for what he called "proper education about tomatoes." I sat on the terrace with my second glass of wine, listening to Signora Ferretti shouting what sounded like accusations at her television, and felt something shift in my chest.

I am not someone who collects people easily. My holidays tend toward the self-contained, the carefully planned, the politely distant. But Bagnoregio does not permit this. The place inserts itself into your business with the same determination that Vittorio applied to his impossible greenhouse. These were not performative welcomes for tourist consumption. They were simply how things worked here. You arrived. You were assessed. You were folded in, with all your obvious deficiencies noted and generously overlooked.

Luisa found me there later and sat down without invitation, producing two more glasses from nowhere. "You will come to the market Saturday," she informed me. "Not a question. I need someone strong to carry my purchases, and Vittorio has a bad back from the tomatoes." She said "the tomatoes" the way others might say "the war."

I agreed, obviously. One does not argue with Luisa. I was learning this already.

That first night I slept better than I had in months, in a bedroom with walls two feet thick and a window that framed the valley like a painting someone had hung specifically for my benefit. Somewhere in the darkness, a dog barked, and another answered, and I thought of Signora Ferretti on her balcony, still watching, still keeping account of everything that moved in her domain.

I had arrived lost, slightly humiliated, and in possession of a chicken farmer's pity. I fell asleep feeling, against all expectation, thoroughly found.