I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I got my first Italian driving lesson before even reaching the property. There I was, pootling along a lakeside road near Bagolino, utterly convinced my sat-nav had developed a vendetta against me, when a tiny Fiat 500 shot past driven by a gentleman who must have been pushing eighty. He had one hand on the wheel, the other waving what appeared to be a salami out the window, and he was bellowing something at me that I later learned was not directions but rather commentary on my distinctly British pace of life. I waved back, slightly panicked, and promptly missed my turning. The salami, I discovered upon arrival, was actually a traditional Bagoss cheese, and the gentleman was my neighbour for the week.

The property itself sat perched above Lake Idro, a lesser-known cousin to Garda and Como that the locals clearly preferred that way. I pulled up to find a woman in her seventies leaning on my gate as if she had been waiting there since approximately 1973. This was Luisa, who introduced herself as the "unofficial welcome committee" and who, within four minutes, had established my marital status, my mother's maiden name, and my apparently pressing need for a digestive liqueur. She produced a bottle of something herbal and aggressive from her cardigan pocket and poured it into a plastic cup she had evidently been carrying for precisely such emergencies.

"You English," she said, not unkindly, "you arrive like frightened rabbits. Drink. The lake does not care if you are tired."

I drank. The lake, I noted, remained magnificently indifferent.

Luisa was merely the opening act. That evening, drawn by the smell of woodsmoke and something indefinably meaty, I wandered toward a cluster of houses where a man in his fifties was attempting to barbecue what appeared to be an entire goat. This was Marco, who ran the local hardware shop and who treated cooking with the same gravity he apparently applied to plumbing emergencies. He spoke no English, I spoke barely any Italian, and yet we spent forty-five minutes in intense negotiation about whether I should turn the sausages he had thrust upon me. A woman watching from her balcony, who introduced herself only as "Signora from number seven," periodically shouted corrections to his technique that he comprehensively ignored.

"You are staying at the rental," she observed, not asked. "The German couple before you complained about church bells. You do not seem like a bell complainer."

I took this as a compliment, though I was not entirely certain.

The following morning brought my most persistent acquaintance: a man called Renato who appeared to do nothing whatsoever except position himself at various points around the village and offer opinions. He found me attempting to photograph the lake at dawn, which he considered a fundamentally suspicious activity.

"Cameras," he announced, materialising from behind a olive tree, "are for people who do not trust their memories. Also, that light is better in November. You are here in wrong month for that light. Come, I will show you right light."

He marched me to a completely different viewpoint, where he proceeded to explain, in extraordinary detail, the romantic histories of every house visible across the water. Some of these stories dated back to the 1950s. He had opinions on all of them, and a curious habit of referring to himself in the third person when delivering particularly scandalous details.

"Renato remembers when that one," he said, pointing at a yellow villa, "was owned by a man from Milan. Very bad. Very Milan. You understand."

I understood nothing and absolutely everything simultaneously.

By my third day, I had become something of a project. Luisa began leaving anonymous cheese offerings on my doorstep. Marco invited me to inspect his new pressure washer, an event I attended with the solemnity it clearly deserved. Signora from number seven started shouting weather forecasts at me across the lane, forecasts that bore no resemblance to any meteorological service but which proved strangely accurate. Renato appointed himself my official photographer, insisting on repositioning me repeatedly with instructions like "more natural" and "less English."

What struck me, and what I kept returning to as I sat on my terrace watching the lake do its indifferent blue thing, was how these encounters had gradually shifted from slightly overwhelming to genuinely moving. I had arrived frazzled, sat-nav battered, expecting a week of peaceful solitude and perhaps a nice bit of hiking. Instead I had stumbled into a community that seemed to operate on principles of cheerful intrusion and unsolicited cheese distribution, and I found I did not mind at all.

There is something particular about these smaller Italian lakes, something that resists the polished tourism of their more famous neighbours. People have time here, or perhaps they simply refuse to acknowledge that time should be spent any other way. They notice you. They comment. They feed you things you did not request and explain at length why you are enjoying them incorrectly.

On my final morning, Luisa appeared at my gate with a wrapped package of Bagoss cheese and a handwritten note I could not read. Renato materialised to translate: "She says you are acceptable for an English person. This is high praise. Also, she says your driving remains terrible but the lake forgives you."

I drove away slowly, very slowly, waving at every human-shaped blur I passed. The sat-nav remained vindictive, the roads remained narrow, and somewhere behind me, I suspected, a tiny Fiat was gaining with another salami-brandishing octogenarian ready to deliver further instruction. I did not look in my rearview mirror. Some lessons, I had learned, are better received with cheerful surrender.