The thing about driving through Lazio in a hire car you've only just got the hang of is that everything feels like an adventure, even the roundabouts. We'd flown into Rome Ciampino, picked up a Fiat Panda that smelled faintly of lemons and regret, and set off north towards Torri in Sabina with what I can only describe as misplaced confidence. My partner was navigating using a phone that kept switching between English and Italian instructions, which is how we ended up taking a scenic detour through someone's olive grove. A actual grove. The farmer, a chap called Enzo who appeared from nowhere like a sun-browned genie, found the whole thing hilarious. "Tourists," he said, throwing his hands up in a gesture that somehow managed to be affectionate and judgemental at once. He pointed us back toward the proper road and refused the twenty euro note I offered, though he did accept a packet of custard creams I'd impulse-bought at the airport.

We found the property eventually, perched on a hillside with views that made the wrong turn feel like destiny rather than incompetence. The keyholder was waiting, a woman in her sixties called Luisa who spoke rapid Italian at us for a solid three minutes before realising we were struggling. She switched to English that was somehow more Italian than her Italian, if that makes sense, all dramatic hand movements and musical emphasis. "You are late," she announced, though she was smiling. "I have made coffee. You will drink it." This was not a question.

The coffee was extraordinary, thick and bitter and nothing like the beige water I usually make at home. Luisa watched us drink it with the intensity of a exam invigilator, then pronounced us acceptable tenants. She showed us around the place, which was simple and clean with terracotta floors that stayed cool even in the afternoon heat. Every few minutes she'd interrupt herself to shout greetings at passing neighbours, who'd shout back without breaking stride. It was like living inside a very small, very loud village opera.

That evening we walked down to the village proper, which took perhaps ten minutes along a lane that smelled of wild rosemary and someone's wood-fired oven. We found a bar, really just a room with three tables and a television showing football with the commentary far too loud. The barman, Giorgio, had a moustache that deserved its own postcode and opinions about Lazio football club that he shared with anyone who made eye contact. I made the mistake of mentioning I'd once seen them play at the Olympic Stadium, and suddenly we were lifelong friends. He poured us wine from an unmarked bottle and refused payment, waving his hands in that universal Italian gesture that means "don't insult me." His wife emerged from the back to tell him off for giving away the good stuff, then joined us for a glass herself.

By the second day we'd acquired what I can only describe as a fan club. The baker, a tiny woman called Rosa who opened at six each morning, started setting aside the best focaccia for "the English who got lost in Enzo's trees." The postman, whose name I never quite caught but who whistled operatically as he made his rounds, would stop to chat about the weather in elaborate detail even when it hadn't changed. An elderly gentleman with a walking stick and a flat cap appeared each evening on the same bench outside the church, and would nod solemnly at us as if we'd passed some invisible test.

What struck me, and what I keep thinking about now I'm back home, is how these small interactions became the whole holiday. The view from the terrace was beautiful, the food was wonderful, but it's Luisa's theatrical coffee inspections and Giorgio's football lectures and Rosa's conspiratorial focaccia handovers that I remember. I went to Lazio expecting to relax, which I did, but I also went expecting to be a tourist, and somehow ended up feeling briefly, gloriously, like a very incompetent local instead. The last morning, Enzo from the olive grove actually waved at us from his tractor as we drove past, and I felt genuinely chuffed, like I'd been accepted into some exclusive club I hadn't applied for.

We left the keys with Luisa, who hugged us and told us we made terrible coffee but were otherwise acceptable. I think that might be the nicest thing anyone's said to me in years.