The sat-nav had been insisting we were "arriving at destination" for a solid ten minutes before I finally accepted that I'd punched in the wrong postcode and we were, in fact, circling a petrol station in the wrong village entirely. My partner sat in the passenger seat with that particular expression of British restraint, the one that says "I shall not mention this now, but it will absolutely resurface during an argument about the washing-up in six months' time."

We found Bergamo eventually, tucked up a narrow lane where the Lake Como foothills start getting properly serious about themselves. The property sits in that deliciously awkward zone where you're technically in the Northern Italian Lakes region but not quite in the postcard bits, which suited us perfectly. Fewer coaches full of day-trippers, more opportunities for me to make a complete hash of basic Italian.

Our first evening, we wandered down to the local bar for what I intended to be a quick aperitivo. What happened instead was three hours with Maurizio, the owner, who had opinions about negroni preparation that could fill a doctoral thesis. He refused to let me order a spritz, which I found initially offensive, then gradually came to respect as the proper negroni did its work. His wife emerged from the kitchen periodically to contradict whatever he'd just said about local history. They'd been married forty-two years; the bickering had achieved a kind of operatic refinement.

"Your husband," she told my partner, gesturing at me with a breadstick, "he has the face of a man who loses things." This was not, I learned, a question. She was assessing me for future reference, and I had clearly failed some invisible test. I spent the rest of the evening patting my pockets compulsively.

The next morning brought us to the village's singular bakery, run by a woman named Carla who recognised us immediately as Maurizio's captives from the previous night. She spoke approximately eleven words of English, which was eleven more than my functional Italian, so we established a communication system based primarily on pointing and interpretive dance. I attempted to explain my preference for a less crispy cornetto. She interpreted this as me having dental problems and spent ten minutes recommending her cousin's son, who was apparently a very good dentist in Lecco. I now have his business card somewhere. I will never use it, but I cannot bring myself to discard it.

What struck me most, perhaps because I'm naturally reserved in that particularly British way that gets mistaken for rudeness abroad, was how these brief encounters accumulated into something that felt genuinely connected. Carlo, the elderly gentleman who appeared each afternoon to feed scraps to stray cats near the property's garden wall, never spoke to us directly for three days. On the fourth, he delivered a ten-minute monologue about his time working in Manchester in the 1970s, which he concluded by declaring all English food "criminal" and me personally responsible for some disappointing tripe he'd encountered in 1974. I apologised, because what else can one do?

By our final evening, Maurizio had progressed to letting me behind the bar to attempt my own negroni, which I botched so comprehensively that his wife actually laughed rather than contradicted him. Progress, of a sort. She patted my arm and said something in rapid Italian that Maurizio declined to translate, though he smirked for the remainder of the evening.

Driving away, slightly hungover, slightly sunburned, I found myself thinking about how I'd arrived expecting landscapes and instead found people, which sounds like something from a motivational poster but felt true nonetheless. The lake glittered in the rear-view mirror. My partner was navigating properly this time. Somewhere in my pocket, I could feel the dentist's business card, pressing gently against my thigh like a small, strange souvenir of conversations I half-understood and completely failed to control.