I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me down what looked like a goat's driveway. Three hours out of Pisa, my hire car and I were having what you might call a disagreement with technology, and the technology was winning. I ended up in a village square so small I could have parked across it, which I nearly did, wedged between a Fiat 500 older than my dad and a wall that had probably seen the Medici ride past.

A man appeared from nowhere, the sort of appearance that makes you wonder if Italians have some secret door in the fabric of reality. He was seventy if he was a day, wearing trousers held up by what I can only describe as optimism and a belt that had seen better decades. He leaned on my window, which I wound down with the enthusiasm of someone about to receive very bad news in a language they barely speak.

"Fucecchio?" he said, before I'd opened my mouth. Word gets around, apparently, when you're clearly lost enough to qualify as village entertainment.

I nodded, trying to look like a competent adult rather than a forty-something woman who had somehow failed at following a line on a screen.

He laughed. Actually threw his head back and laughed, revealing teeth that could have done with meeting a dentist sometime in the previous century. Then he started giving directions in a mixture of Italian, gestures, and what I suspect was some local dialect that even other Tuscans would struggle with. I caught "sempre dritto" and something that involved pointing at a church, then a tree, then making a noise like a tractor. I wrote it all down anyway, nodding as if this were perfectly normal navigation advice.

Twenty minutes later, after one wrong turn that took me past a vineyard where workers waved cheerfully at my obvious confusion, I found the place. And there was my man again, sitting on a wall outside the property, as if he'd teleported. He'd been waiting for me, he explained through the property manager who'd come out to greet us, because he wanted to make sure "la signora inglese" didn't end up in Florence by accident.

The property manager, Elena, was a different sort entirely. Younger, brisk, efficient in that way that suggests she could run a small country given an afternoon and decent coffee. She was showing me round the place, which was gorgeous in that rustic Tuscan way - beams you could hang a swing from, terracotta floors that had probably been there since before my country existed - when she paused at the kitchen window.

"You met Bruno," she said, and it wasn't a question.

I admitted I had.

She smiled, the first crack in her professional exterior. "Bruno knows everyone. Everything. If you want to know who is cheating on who in three villages, ask Bruno. If you want to know the weather next Thursday, Bruno will tell you, and he will be right." She paused. "He is also my nonno. My grandfather. He has been sitting on that wall since 1987, he says, though I think this is exaggeration. Maybe 1995."

Bruno, it emerged, had appointed himself unofficial ambassador to the property. Every guest for years, apparently, received the Bruno treatment. Some found him alarming. Most, Elena said, ended up having dinner with him by the end of their stay.

I wasn't sure about dinner. I was still recovering from the directions and the laughter and the general sense that I'd been thoroughly assessed and found entertainingly inadequate. But that evening, as I sat on the terrace with a glass of wine that tasted like someone had bottled the actual landscape, I found myself hoping he'd reappear.

He did, of course. The next morning, with a bag of tomatoes from his garden and opinions about my coffee-making that he expressed entirely through facial expressions. I made him a cup. He made a noise like a tractor again, which I was beginning to understand meant something between acceptance and reluctant approval.

By day three, I was part of the furniture, or so it felt. The baker in the village, a woman called Luisa with flour permanently embedded in her forearms, asked after Bruno when I went for bread. The postman, who I encountered on a walk that was supposed to be "a gentle stroll" and became something more like a minor expedition, wanted to know if "the old fox" had tried to sell me any of his wine yet. He hadn't, but apparently this was coming.

I realised, somewhere around day four, that this was what I'd actually come for. Not the villa, though it was lovely. Not the views, though they made me stop mid-step regularly, causing Bruno to tut behind me when he insisted on accompanying me to "make sure I didn't get creative with directions again." I'd come for this - the being known, even briefly, by people who had no reason to care but did anyway.

On my last morning, Bruno produced a bottle from somewhere. No label, just glass and liquid and a look of intense pride. "Vino," he said, unnecessarily. "Buono." This from a man who had communicated entire symphonies through eyebrow movements alone.

I took it. Of course I took it. I'm drinking it now, actually, back in my kitchen that doesn't have terracotta floors or beams or any character whatsoever. It tastes like sun and dust and that particular silence you get in the Tuscan hills, the one that makes you think thoughts you weren't planning to have.

I think about Bruno's directions, which I still have written down. I think about Elena's exasperated fondness. I think about Luisa's bread, which I have not found anything close to since. Mostly I think about how I arrived thinking I was booking a property, and left feeling like I'd been briefly adopted by a village that had absolutely no obligation to be kind, but was anyway.

The sat nav still lives in a drawer. Some things don't deserve forgiveness.