The sat nav had been promising we'd arrive in twenty minutes for the best part of an hour, which I suppose is what you get for trusting Italian roads with a device that still thinks Brexit was a good idea. We'd flown into Rome Fiumicino, picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of lemons and regret, and pointed ourselves north towards the coast. Montalto di Castro, somewhere in that glorious Lazio hinterland between proper countryside and the Tyrrhenian Sea.

My other half, Sarah, had done the booking. "It's got character," she'd said, waving her phone at me in the kitchen back in Sheffield. I'd nodded along, distracted by my attempt to cook pasta without setting off the smoke alarm. Character, I now understood, was estate agent speak for "the journey will test your relationship and your clutch control."

The mishap came three miles out, at a roundabout that appeared to have been designed by someone who'd only heard about roundabouts secondhand. I took the exit that felt right, which is of course the one that was wrong, and within minutes we were bumping down a farm track between rows of kiwi fruit vines. Not a holiday home in sight. Just an increasingly unimpressed Labrador watching from a gate, and Sarah making that small humming noise she does when she's deciding whether to laugh or file this away for future arguments.

I performed what the hire car company would generously call a "multi-point turn" and eventually found the proper road, which was barely wider than a determined cyclist and lined with oleander bushes that scraped the wing mirrors like nature's own car wash. The sat nav finally gave up and went silent, perhaps in protest, perhaps in shame.

Then we saw it. The property sat back from the lane behind a low wall and a garden that had clearly spent the Italian summer doing exactly as it pleased. Terracotta pots, a lemon tree heavy with fruit, and a pergola draped with vines that cast dappled shade over a wooden table. The sort of table, I immediately thought, where you would sit with a glass of something local and congratulate yourself on having made it this far.

Our host appeared from around the side of the house, wiping her hands on an apron and looking remarkably unsurprised to see us rattling up in a Fiat that now bore the botanical evidence of our wrong turn. She spoke rapid Italian that Sarah, with her three years of evening classes, attempted to match. I smiled and nodded and understood approximately every fourth word, which is my standard approach to most social situations.

The key handover involved more gestures than a football referee and a small dog that insisted on inspecting our luggage. The house itself was simple, solid, the kind of place where you could tell the walls had seen decades of family holidays and probably heard arguments about whose turn it was to buy bread. The kitchen smelled of dried herbs from a rack above the window. The bedroom had wooden shutters that opened onto that garden, that table, that particular quality of afternoon light that makes you want to abandon any plans you'd made and simply stop.

I stood there with my bag still half-unpacked, watching Sarah attempt to communicate our gratitude through a combination of broken Italian and interpretive dance, and felt that particular shift that happens when a journey's discomforts suddenly become the story you'll tell later. The wrong turn, the scratched car, the dog, the language barrier. Already they were softening into something fond.

We'd brought wine from a supermarket near the airport, which suddenly seemed an absurd thing to have done. There would be local places, local bottles, local people who would tolerate our attempts at connection. But for that first evening, we sat under the pergola with our inadequate supermarket purchase and watched the light change over the kiwi fruit vines in the distance, and it was exactly enough.

The sat nav, I noticed, had not recovered from its sulk and was now insisting we were somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. I switched it off and finished my glass, deciding that for the next few days, being lost was rather the point.