I have never been so relieved to see a village name on a road sign as I was when we finally spotted Puegnago del Garda. Three hours earlier, my partner had confidently declared that we did not need sat nav because he had "a feel for Italian roads." That feeling, it turned out, was mostly panic mixed with a stubborn refusal to admit we were lost somewhere near Desenzano, circling the same roundabout for the fourth time while I clutched a printed map upside down.

The mishap that truly defined our arrival, though, came at a petrol station just outside Salo. I had been practising my Italian phrases for weeks, determined to order coffee and ask directions like a local. What I had not practised was explaining, in increasingly desperate hand gestures, that I had just filled our diesel hire car with unleaded petrol. The attendant, a wiry man named Bruno with eyebrows like two caterpillars having an argument, watched my pantomime with the patience of someone who had seen this dozens of times before. "Inglese?" he asked, not unkindly. I nodded, mortified. He whistled, phoned someone, and within twenty minutes a teenage boy arrived with a siphon and the kind of cheerful efficiency that only comes from regular practice. Bruno charged me forty euros and pressed a cold limonata into my hand. "Per i nervi," he said. For the nerves. I drank it in three gulps and wondered if I could simply live at the petrol station forever.

By the time we reached the property, a modest stone house with terracotta pots and a view of the lake that made me gasp despite everything, I was ready to collapse. The key was in a lockbox, which of course I could not open, which is how we met our first true local character: Signora Ferretti from next door, who appeared with a hairdryer still plugged in trailing from her window. She was eighty if she was a day, dressed in a floral housecoat and slippers that had seen better decades. Without a word of English, she assessed the situation, took the code from my trembling hand, and opened the box first try. Then she stood in the doorway of our holiday let, clicking her tongue at the furnishings while I hovered awkwardly with our suitcases.

Over the next hour, she produced a bottle of homemade grappa from somewhere, introduced us to her cat (Mussolini, "but we call him Mussi now, for obvious reasons"), and explained through elaborate gestures that the oven did not work on Tuesdays. I did not question this. I simply accepted it as one of the mysteries of Lake Garda, like why the water is that particular impossible blue. She told me, via pointing at my wedding ring and then at my partner, who was attempting to unpack without making eye contact, that marriage was "una guerra lunga." A long war. Then she laughed until she coughed, patted my cheek with a hand that smelled of garlic and rosewater, and shuffled back to her hairdryer.

That evening, walking to the village for supplies, we passed a group of elderly men playing cards outside the tabacchi. One of them, wearing a cap that read "Chicago Bulls" despite having no apparent interest in basketball, shouted something at us that my limited Italian translated roughly as commentary on my partner's sandals. They all found this hilarious. We found a trattoria where the owner refused to show us a menu, simply bringing food until we begged him to stop, and where a waiter named Marco spent twenty minutes explaining why Garda wine was superior to anything from Tuscany, a claim he supported by opening three bottles for us to "compare."

I fell asleep that first night with the shutters open, the lake breathing below, and the distant sound of Signora Ferretti shouting at Mussolini for some feline transgression. I thought about Bruno's limonata, and the siphon boy's cheerful whistle, and the card players who had waved us off like old friends. I had arrived as a flustered tourist who put petrol in a diesel car. By sunset, somehow, I felt like someone who might belong here, at least for a week. The oven would not work tomorrow, of course. It was Tuesday.