The sat nav gave up on us somewhere between Urbino and complete despair, which is how we found ourselves down a track so narrow that my other half had to fold in the wing mirrors and hold his breath. I was navigating with a printout from the letting agency, because of course I had forgotten to download the offline map, and the paper had gone soggy from a spilled bottle of San Benedetto. We were forty minutes late, sweaty, and I had just loudly announced that I could absolutely see a wild boar when it turned out to be a wheelie bin.

The house itself, when we finally crept up to it, looked like someone had plonked a handsome stone farmhouse in the middle of a postcard and forgotten to tell us we had won the lottery. Terracotta pots everywhere. That particular silence you only get in the Italian countryside, broken by what I initially thought was a goat but was actually Maurizio, the neighbour, clearing his throat.

Maurizio appeared from behind a lemon tree like a genie in a flat cap. He spoke no English. I speak Italian like a toddler with a head injury. Within three minutes he had established that we were English, that my husband's name was "Molto Bene" because he panicked and said it instead of "Mark," and that we absolutely must come for coffee tomorrow or he would be personally offended. He shook my hand for so long I started to worry it was a local custom I had not read about.

The key was under a terracotta chicken. Of course it was.

Inside, the house smelled of lavender and old wood. I immediately walked into a shutter that I had opened without noticing. Mark laughed for eleven straight minutes. I laughed too, eventually, once I had established that my eyebrow was not actually bleeding.

We dumped our bags and went in search of dinner, because the mishaps had given us the sort of hunger that makes reasonable people weep in supermarkets. The nearest village was Piobbico proper, about ten minutes by car, though Mark insisted we could walk it until we saw the incline. We drove. The restaurant was one of those family affairs where the nonna peers at you from the kitchen and the son explains the wine list with the gravity of a man discussing his divorce.

We got talking to the couple at the next table because the husband, Enzo, recognised Mark's football shirt and spent twenty minutes explaining why his team was "like a beautiful woman who steals your wallet." His wife, Luisa, translated when he got too passionate, which was often. They were from Ancona, up for the weekend, and insisted we try their friend's pecorino, which the restaurant happened to have, which made me wonder how many times they had performed this routine. I did not care. The cheese was extraordinary. Enzo cried actual tears when describing a goal from 1987.

Walking back to the car, slightly wine-happy, we encountered Maurizio again. He had been waiting, apparently. He produced a bottle of homemade something from his jacket with the casual menace of a drug dealer in a film, and we stood in the village square drinking it from plastic cups while he told us, we think, about his brother's tractor. A dog joined us. I do not know whose dog it was. It stayed for the whole second bottle.

I kept thinking about how we had arrived flustered and ridiculous, how I had mistaken a bin for wildlife, how Mark had accidentally renamed himself, and how none of it mattered because Maurizio had decided we were his people now. There is something about places like this, about the Marche, about these hills that feel untouched by the performance of tourism. You do not visit. You are absorbed.

The dog followed us home. We named him Maurizio Junior. He slept on our doorstep and was gone by morning, presumably off to adopt some other hapless English couple.

I have never been so happy to get something so wrong.