The sat-nav gave up on us somewhere between Turin and nowhere, which is how I found myself reversing a hire car down a one-lane track while a man in a Fiat Panda the size of a shoebox leaned on his horn with the dedication of someone conducting Verdi. We had been aiming for Castelnuovo Bormida, a village so small you could sneeze and miss it, and I had just sneezed. The mishap, if you want to call it that, was entirely mine: I had confused "strada provinciale" with "sentiero" and committed us to what appeared to be a goat's commuting route. The Fiat Panda man eventually squeezed past, shaking his head with the theatrical resignation of someone who had seen this exact scene forty times that morning alone.

We arrived at the property properly flustered, me still gripping the steering wheel like it owed me money, and were met by Marco, the caretaker, who was leaning against a stone wall eating what I initially thought was an apple but turned out to be a raw onion. He took one look at our dust-covered Renault and said, "Ah, you met Giuseppe," which I assumed meant the Fiat man, though he never clarified and I never asked. Marco spoke English in the manner of someone who had learned it exclusively from American crime films, so every sentence came out slightly menacing even when he was offering us lemonade. "You will enjoy the pool," he said, squinting. "It is... very wet."

The house itself was one of those solid Piedmontese stone affairs that looks like it has been there since before gravity was properly invented. Marco showed us round with the enthusiasm of a man who had done this tour perhaps eleven thousand times, pausing only to shout at a cat that was not there. "My grandmother's cat," he explained, though the cat remained invisible. "He is dead since 1987. But I still shout." I found this so unexpectedly moving that I had to pretend to examine a light switch until I composed myself.

Our neighbour appeared that evening, introduced simply as "the Professor," though what he professed in remained mysterious. He was eighty if he was a day, wore three jumpers in July, and immediately invited himself to our terrace with a bottle of something homemade and possibly flammable. "You are English," he announced, pouring with the confidence of a man who had never once worried about measures. "I knew an Englishman in 1964. He was bald. Are you bald under your hat?" I was not wearing a hat. The Professor found this hilarious and slapped his own knee with genuine violence.

By the second glass, he had told us about his late wife's hatred of mushrooms, his theory that all good wine tastes of "sadness and geography," and his ongoing feud with Marco about whether a particular fig tree belonged to one property or the other. "The figs are terrible this year," he confided, though he said this every year, according to Marco, who had wandered over to shout at the dead cat in our direction. "Last year also terrible. But 1987, magnificent." Everything good, I noticed, seemed to have happened in 1987, including the cat.

What struck me, sitting there with my knees sun-pinked and my Italian deteriorating with each sip, was how quickly these strangers had folded us into their ongoing stories. The Professor and Marco bickered about the fig tree with the practiced intimacy of brothers; Marco's dead cat haunted every conversation; Giuseppe presumably continued terrorising lost tourists in his Panda. I had arrived expecting picturesque isolation, the sort of rural fantasy where you read novels and drink local wine in meaningful silence. Instead I got a small village's worth of characters who seemed genuinely delighted by the novelty of fresh audience members, and who treated our sat-nav incompetence not as tourist foolishness but as a necessary rite of passage.

I woke the next morning to Marco singing opera in the garden, badly, and the Professor waving from his window with what appeared to be a courgette. The wine from the night before had not been flammable, as it turned out, but it had certainly been persuasive. I lay there listening to Marco hit a high note that made birds evacuate nearby trees, and I thought: this is what I came for, I just did not know it yet. The mishap with the goat track had delivered us here, to this particular terrace, with these particular people who would never feature in any brochure but who would, I suspected, remain clearer in my memory than any vineyard or castle.

We stayed a week. By the end, the Professor had taught me to identify three types of local weed that were apparently edible, though I never tested this; Marco had shown me photographs of his grandmother's cat, who was indeed magnificent; and Giuseppe, encountered again in the village bar, had bought me a coffee without comment, which I understood to be complete forgiveness. I left with a bottle of the Professor's wine, a courgette I did not ask for, and the certain knowledge that I would never again trust a sat-nav within forty miles of Piedmont.