The sat nav gave up on us just outside Ancona, which I took as a sign we were properly in the Italian countryside. My partner, ever the optimist, insisted we "follow our noses" towards Treia. This led us down a farm track where we nearly collided with a gentleman on a Vespa carrying what appeared to be three live chickens in a wicker basket. He didn't even slow down, merely raised one hand in a gesture that could have been greeting, warning, or philosophical resignation.

We finally found our holiday let, a handsome stone farmhouse with a pool that looked almost indecently blue against the dusty green hills. I was still laughing about the chickens when we met our host, a wiry chap called Franco who spoke English in the manner of someone who had learned it exclusively from 1970s western films. "You are arrived," he announced, which felt less like observation and more like prophecy.

Franco insisted on giving us the full tour, which took nearly an hour because he kept stopping to argue with himself about whether various appliances were "new new" or merely "new from before." The washing machine, he informed us with great seriousness, was "new from before 2019, but new enough." I nodded as if this made perfect sense, which after twelve hours of travel, it almost did.

The real treasure of that first evening came when Franco introduced us to his neighbour, a retired schoolteacher called Signora Bianchi who lived in the adjacent cottage and apparently considered it her duty to assess all incoming foreigners. She arrived with a plate of olive ascolane, those magnificent fried olives stuffed with meat that Marche does better than anywhere else, and proceeded to interrogate us over them.

"You are married?" she asked, peering at my left hand.

"Not exactly," I said.

"Better," she declared, popping an olive into her mouth with the precision of a woman who had spent decades correcting homework. "My husband, he was exactly. Now he is exactly dead."

I choked slightly on my own olive. Franco helpfully slapped my back with the enthusiasm of a man tenderising steak.

Signora Bianchi, it emerged, had taught Latin for forty years and still muttered declensions under her breath when agitated. She became visibly agitated when I mentioned I had studied "a bit of Italian" at evening classes. "A bit," she repeated, as if I had confessed to a minor crime. "We shall see."

What followed was a conversation that can only be described as asymmetric. She spoke at length about the history of Treia, about the medieval battles and the annual palio and how the young people nowadays cared only for their telefonini. I understood perhaps one word in four, but her expressive eyebrows carried most of the meaning. When she described a former mayor as "a man with the brain of a chicken," she didn't need translation. Franco helpfully confirmed that this was the same man who had once tried to ban bicycles from the town centre on Wednesdays.

By the time the light faded, we had also met Franco brother-in-law, a silent fellow called Marco who had appeared from nowhere to fix a wobbly sun lounger and who communicated almost exclusively through meaningful shrugs. He and Franco conducted an entire argument about pool chlorine levels without either speaking above a mutter, while Signora Bianchi provided running commentary to us as if we were watching a sporting event.

"Marco thinks the water is too much chemical," she translated, though Marco had said nothing audible. "Franco thinks Marco is too much worry. They are like this since 1987."

I found myself wondering what I must look like to them, this tired British woman nodding along to conversations she barely followed, accepting fried food from strangers with the desperate gratitude of the truly lost. There something humbling about it, and something rather wonderful too. I had planned this trip with spreadsheets and printed maps, with restaurant reviews and carefully noted opening hours. None of it had survived contact with actual Treia, with its chicken-carrying Vespas and its Latin-muttering pensioners and its brothers-in-law who communicated through pure negative energy.

As we finally collapsed into bed that night, my partner murmured that perhaps we should have arrived earlier, or later, or possibly on a different day entirely. But I disagreed. There a particular magic to that first evening, to being slightly overwhelmed and entirely out of depth, to discovering that your carefully planned holiday has already escaped your control and found better things to do.

The pool, I noted before sleep took me, really was indecently blue. I would worry about the chlorine tomorrow. Or perhaps Marco would worry about it for me, silently, as was his way.