I have never been so grateful for a sat nav's robotic patience as I was driving into Vallerotonda Frazione last July. Three hours out of Rome, convinced I was taking the scenic route, I followed what I thought was a shortcut down a track that grew narrower with every bend. By the time I met a shepherd called Franco blocking the way with his flock, I had accepted my fate. He leaned on his crook, watched me reverse fifty metres with the grace of a drunken crab, then directed me back to the proper road with hand gestures so elaborate I thought he might be casting a spell. I arrived at the stone house with dust on my boots, sheep wool on my bumper, and what felt like permanent clutch foot.

The property itself sat perched on a slope, all weathered walls and terracotta tiles, with a view that made my reversing humiliation almost worthwhile. Almost. I was still muttering about my own stupidity when the key holder appeared, a wiry woman in her sixties called Signora Bianchi who spoke English in the manner of someone who had learned it exclusively from wartime films. "You are the English," she announced, not unkindly. "You have lost." I confirmed this was accurate in several respects.

She showed me round with the brisk efficiency of a sergeant major inspecting barracks, pausing only to deliver unsolicited commentary on British driving, British weather, and British cooking, each observation delivered with a shrug that suggested these were tragedies beyond remedy. When I mentioned the shepherd incident, her face softened for perhaps half a second. "Franco," she said, with the weight of decades. "He is waiting for the lost. Always." I chose not to ask how many lost souls he intercepted weekly.

The neighbours introduced themselves without invitation, as neighbours do in places where boundaries operate differently. First came Marco from the adjacent cottage, bearing tomatoes and a warning about the water pressure that he delivered as if revealing a family curse. He had retired from Turin, he explained, to grow vegetables and argue with his brother in Rome via telephone. The tomatoes were perfect; the brother, apparently, was not. He stayed for an hour, declining offers of coffee, simply standing in my kitchen doorway holding forth on local politics with the passion of a man who had found his true calling in opposition.

By evening I had also met the village priest, Don Paolo, who wandered past as I wrestled with the outdoor barbecue and offered to bless my efforts. He was seventy if he was a day, with eyebrows like abandoned bird nests and a habit of answering his own questions before you could respond. "You are cooking meat? Of course you are cooking meat. The English cook meat. I will pray for the meat." He did so, briefly and theatrically, then accepted a beer with the ease of a man who had long ago made peace with earthly pleasures.

Sitting on the terrace that first night, nursing a glass of local white and the last of Franco's cheese which Signora Bianchi had pressed upon me, I found myself laughing at my own ridiculous arrival. The sat nav had not steered me wrong, not really. I had simply assumed I knew better than a machine and a shepherd combined. There is something humbling about being the entertainment in a village that has seen every variety of visitor stumble through.

The stars came out with theatrical brilliance, unpolluted by anything resembling a city. Somewhere below, a dog barked at nothing. I thought of Marco's tomatoes, Don Paolo's blessing, Franco's elaborate directions, and Signora Bianchi's magnificent disdain. I had come for the view and the quiet, perhaps, but what I had found was something more complicated and far more human. A place where you are observed, commented upon, fed, corrected, and ultimately folded into the daily theatre of small lives lived with enormous character.

I went to bed that night with the window open, listening to distant voices carrying up the hillside, none of which I could understand and all of which sounded like invitations.