I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when my sat-nav decided Vitorchiano did not exist. There I was, winding through the Lazio countryside, arguing with a disembodied voice that kept insisting I turn left into a field of olive trees. Three times I obeyed. Three times I found myself face to face with a very unimpressed goat. By the time I actually reached the village, I had named the goat Giuseppe and was half-tempted to invite him along for the week.

The property sat on the edge of Vitorchiano's historic centre, a solid stone house with shutters that looked like they had witnessed several centuries of Italian drama. I was still laughing at my own navigational incompetence when the front door swung open and there stood Marco, the caretaker, wearing a jumper that had definitely seen better decades and an expression of amused recognition.

"You are the Englishman who visited Giuseppe," he said, deadpan. Word travels fast in villages of eight hundred souls. I later learned Marco had watched my entire goat encounter from his cousin's terrace, accompanied by a glass of wine and what he described as "the best entertainment since the festival of San Giovanni."

Marco handed me keys that weighed approximately half a kilo and launched into a property tour that quickly became a tour of his opinions. The boiler was "a good friend but temperamental, like my ex-wife." The washing machine "works when it feels respected." The terrace view, he announced with theatrical pause, was "acceptable." It was, in fact, spectacular - rolling hills dissolving into blue haze, the distant outline of Monte Cimino, swallows carving patterns overhead. Marco shrugged at my enthusiasm. "You should see it in September. Or don't. Then everyone comes. Better you come now and leave September for me."

My first morning, I ventured to the village bar for coffee and encountered Lucia, who had run the place since before I was born and treated customers with the selective warmth of a woman who has seen too many tourists promise to return and never do. She looked at my order of cappuccino after eleven with the expression usually reserved for mild criminal behaviour.

"English?" she asked, though it was not really a question. "My nephew married an English girl. She drinks this at dinner. We do not discuss it." She delivered an espresso instead, correctly assuming I would not argue. We established that I was staying "in Marco's house," which prompted a knowing look and a shouted conversation with an elderly man in the corner who turned out to be Marco's uncle Renzo, partially deaf and entirely opinionated.

Renzo shuffled over, refused my offer of a chair, and delivered a ten-minute assessment of my shoes, my hair, and my obvious need for proper food. "Marco cooks never," he announced. "I will tell my daughter. She brings you something." Before I could protest, he had phoned her. There was no signal in the bar. He went outside to find one. Lucia rolled her eyes with the affection of long practice. "He does this. Always. You will eat well. Do not try to stop it."

That evening, Maria arrived with a container of amatriciana that could have fed four, accompanied by her own assessment of my single status, my career, and my failure to learn Italian beyond restaurant vocabulary. "You say 'grazie' like you are sorry," she observed. "Say it like you mean it. Like you would say to Giuseppe." They all knew about Giuseppe. Of course they did.

By day three, I had accumulated a village of accidental acquaintances. The baker who insisted I try three varieties of ciambella before purchasing. The elderly woman who sat on her doorstep each evening and narrated my comings and goings to no one visible, occasionally shouting corrections to my parking. A teenager named Tommaso who practised English by describing his football team's tragedies in exhaustive detail while I attempted to buy vegetables.

What struck me was the absence of performance in any of it. No one was being charming for tourist benefit. Lucia remained faintly disapproving. Renzo continued shouting into his phone at the bar entrance. Maria delivered further unsolicited commentary on my life choices alongside subsequent meals. Marco appeared periodically to check that I had not broken anything, share village news, and borrow my car to move a table because his was blocked by his mother's visit.

On my final evening, I found myself on the terrace with a bottle of local Cesanese, watching swallows against that same blue haze. Marco had wandered up, apparently having decided I was now sufficiently vetted to receive his actual thoughts rather than his caretaker performance. We talked, or rather he talked and I listened, about leaving and returning, about the weight of keys and the lightness of knowing exactly where you belong.

I said "grazie" as I left, trying for Maria's version, the one that sounded like gratitude rather than apology. Marco nodded, almost satisfied. Giuseppe, I assumed, remained unimpressed in his field. I drove away without satellite assistance, following Renzo's shouted directions from his doorway, wrong at least twice but somehow ending up exactly where I needed to go.