The satnav gave up somewhere between Siena and sanity, which is how I found myself reversing down a gravel track near Asciano, convinced I'd either discovered a secret military base or accidentally enrolled in an Italian driving exam. I'd been humming along to Radio 2, smug with my airport croissant, when the voice calmly announced "you have reached your destination" at what was unmistakably a goat enclosure. The goats seemed unimpressed. One of them, a magnificent bearded fellow with the air of a retired philosophy professor, fixed me with a look that said "you're not from round here, are you?"

I wound down the window to consult a passing woman carrying what appeared to be an entire olive branch. She was perhaps seventy, dressed in the sort of practical layers that suggested she'd been up since four doing something agricultural and important. "Asciano?" I offered, holding up my phone like a digital white flag. She squinted, then laughed, a proper throaty cackle that made the goats shift nervously. "Americana?" she asked. I confessed my Britishness. She found this even funnier.

What followed was twenty minutes of elaborate pantomime. She spoke rapid Tuscan dialect; I offered my GCSE Italian, which had apparently fossilised sometime around 1998 and focused heavily on ordering train tickets and describing my pen. We established, through pointing and enthusiastic nodding, that I'd missed a turning approximately three kilometres back, near a tree that she described in such specific detail that I suspected it had a name and possibly a birthday. She refused to let me leave without accepting a handful of tiny plums from her pocket, which she pressed on me with the insistence of someone administering vital medicine. They were extraordinary, sharp and honeyed, and I ate them immediately, juice running down my wrist, while she watched with maternal satisfaction.

Properly directed, I found the property tucked among rolling hills that looked almost indecently picturesque, like someone had art-directed the entire countryside for maximum aesthetic impact. A man was waiting by the entrance, leaning against a Fiat Panda with the patience of someone who had long ago made peace with foreign incompetence. This was Marco, the caretaker, whose English was roughly equivalent to my Italian, which made us either perfectly matched or doomed to mutual confusion.

He showed me round with the resigned efficiency of a man who had witnessed every possible holidaymaker malfunction. The pool, he explained slowly, was "not for the jumping." The washing machine was "not for the shoes." I nodded gravely, wondering what previous guests had done to necessitate these specific prohibitions. When I asked about local restaurants, his face transformed. Suddenly he was alive, gesturing towards invisible mountains of pasta, making the sound of a perfectly cooked steak hitting a plate with such visceral enthusiasm that my stomach audibly responded.

That evening I walked into Asciano proper, still slightly sticky from plum juice, and found myself in a tiny enoteca run by a couple who introduced themselves simply as "we are the Bianchis." They'd been married forty-three years, they informed me within ninety seconds, and they still argued about whether their Brunello was ready. She thought it needed another year; he poured me a glass to prove her wrong. "She is always wrong," he whispered loudly. "I am always right," she confirmed, not looking up from her newspaper. They bickered beautifully, like a long-running radio play, and I sat there for hours, drinking wine that tasted of sun and patience, eating bread that Mrs Bianchi had made that morning, feeling less like a tourist and more like someone who had accidentally wandered into a family argument and been handed a plate.

I went to bed that night slightly drunk on hospitality, my satnav still sulking in the glove compartment, already certain that getting lost had been the entire point.