I have never been so relieved to see a washing machine in my life. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The drive from Milan Malpensa had already tested my patience and my partner's navigational skills in equal measure. Three hours of winding through Lombardy's lake district, each bend revealing another impossibly perfect village clinging to a hillside, another vineyard, another glimpse of Lake Maggiore sparkling through the trees. Beautiful, yes, but after the early flight and the hire car queue and the realisation that I had packed entirely the wrong shoes, I was ready to stop moving.

We found the turnoff for Pezzoro easily enough, a narrow track climbing away from the main road near Maccagno. The satnav gave up about halfway up, which should have been our first warning. The second warning came when we met a tractor coming the other way, and I had to reverse thirty metres down a slope that felt vertical, my partner making helpful noises like "you've got loads of room" when I demonstrably did not.

The third warning, and this is where the mishap comes in, was the gate. A perfectly charming wooden gate, slightly weathered, with a heavy iron latch that looked like it had secured this property since the Renaissance. I hopped out to open it, feeling terribly rustic and Italian, swung it wide with perhaps more enthusiasm than necessary, and watched in slow motion as it rebounded off a stone post and caught me squarely on the forehead. Not hard enough to require medical attention. Hard enough that I sat down rather suddenly in the gravel, saw actual stars, and spilled the remains of my airport coffee down my only clean jumper.

My partner did not laugh. Not immediately. There was a decent five seconds of concerned silence first, which I appreciated.

The owner, a wiry man called Franco who appeared from nowhere, helped me up with the resigned air of someone who has seen worse from British tourists. He spoke rapid Italian that my partner somehow followed, then switched to broken English for my benefit. "The gate," he said, gesturing at my forehead, "she has history." I believe this was meant to comfort me.

But then we walked through, and I forgot about the bump and the coffee and the indignity of it all.

Pezzoro sits on a terrace cut into the hillside, and the view stops you properly. Lake Maggiore stretches below, hazy blue in the afternoon light, with the mountains rising beyond it into proper Alpine territory. The house itself is stone and terracotta, nothing fancy, nothing trying too hard. A covered terrace with a table that could seat eight, though there are only two of us. Pots of herbs that Franco clearly tends with more care than he expended on my head injury. Lemon trees in terracotta pots, their leaves glossy and impossibly green.

Inside, the floors are terracotta tile, cool underfoot, and the kitchen has that particular Italian practicality where everything is slightly wrong until you realise it is exactly right. The coffee maker is a moka pot, obviously. There is no kettle, which caused me five minutes of confusion until I accepted that this is simply not a kettle household. The fridge is small and noisy and works perfectly.

I noticed the washing machine while hunting for painkillers. It sits in a utility corner off the kitchen, front-loading, slightly battered, the most beautiful appliance I have ever encountered. Because here is the thing I have not mentioned yet. In my coffee-soaked bag, in the boot of the car, were all my clean clothes. Every item I had carefully packed for a week of lakeside sophistication. And they were now smelling of lukewarm cappuccino and airport regret.

Franco had left a bottle of local white wine on the table, a Garganega I think, with a note in block capitals saying "WELCOME." I sat on the terrace with a glass pressed against my forehead, my partner running the first of what would be three washing cycles, and watched the light change over the lake. The painkiller kicked in. Somewhere below, a church bell rang six times. A gecko appeared on the wall, observed us with apparent approval, and vanished.

I thought about how I had planned this trip for months, researched restaurants and walking routes and the best place to buy olive oil. I had not planned for a gate assault, or for the peculiar intimacy of watching a stranger load your underwear into a strange washing machine. But there is something about the first evening in a new place, when you are slightly bruised and slightly silly and everything smells of unfamiliar detergent, that feels more honest than any polished travel moment.

Tomorrow we might walk to Maccagno for bread and explore the lakeside path that Franco mentioned. Tomorrow I will wear my one remaining clean shirt and feel very pleased with myself. Tonight, I am sitting with wine and a view that costs nothing and a partner who finally laughed, properly, once she knew I was not concussed.

The gate, I have learned, opens inward if you know what you are doing. I do not know what I am doing yet. But I am here, and the washing machine hums, and the lake is very beautiful, and I have already failed perfectly at being a competent traveller. It feels like the right place to start.