The SatNav had other ideas about how to reach Avigliano Umbro, which is how I found myself wedged between two olive groves on a track roughly the width of a pizza box, questioning every life choice that had led me to this moment. My hire car, a Fiat 500 that now felt about as sturdy as a shopping trolley, was making a noise I can only describe as "existential dread." I had followed the woman's voice on the GPS with the blind faith of a pilgrim, and she had repaid me by sending me down what appeared to be a goat's private driveway.

I eventually reversed out with the dignity of a man trying to extract himself from a child's swing, found the actual road, and arrived at the stone farmhouse twenty minutes later than planned, smelling slightly of panic and clutch smoke. Elena, the owner, was waiting on the terrace with two glasses of something chilled and a smile that suggested she had seen this exact scene approximately four hundred times before.

"You took the scenic route," she said, which is Italian for "you are an idiot but I am too polite to say so."

The property sat on a gentle slope surrounded by nothing but vineyards, cypress trees, and the kind of silence that makes a Londoner immediately suspicious. Elena showed me round with the practised efficiency of someone who had hosted every variation of British tourist imaginable. The pool, she explained, was shared with the other half of the property, currently occupied by a German couple who were "very serious about their swimming." I pictured two people in goggles doing lengths at dawn and felt immediately inadequate about my own approach, which would mostly involve floating and drinking things with umbrellas.

That evening I walked down to the village, a fifteen-minute stroll that became forty because I kept stopping to look at things. An old man called Aldo was sitting outside his garage, which appeared to contain one tractor and approximately twelve thousand tools arranged with what I can only describe as aggressive precision. He spoke no English and I speak Italian like a toddler with a head injury, yet we managed a twenty-minute conversation about tomatoes, the English weather, and whether my shoes were suitable for "real walking." He was deeply sceptical about the shoes. He was not wrong.

I bought bread from a shop where the woman behind the counter insisted on telling me about her nephew in Manchester, a place she had never visited but felt qualified to discuss at length. "Always raining," she said, handing me a loaf that was still warm. "He has a girlfriend from Poland. Very tall." This seemed to conclude her thoughts on the matter. I nodded with the gravity of someone receiving profound wisdom.

By the time I wandered back up the hill, the sun was doing that particular Umbrian thing where everything turns golden and slightly unreal. Elena had left a bottle of her own wine on my terrace with a note that read "For the scenic route driver" in handwriting that managed to be both friendly and faintly mocking.

I sat there with my shoes off, my unsuitable footwear discarded in shame, and watched the swallows darting about against a sky that seemed almost aggressively beautiful, like nature showing off. Aldo had given me two tomatoes from his garden, wrapped in newspaper with the care usually reserved for explosives. They were, I would discover later, the best tomatoes I have ever eaten, though this may have been partially because he had grown them specifically to prove a point about my life choices.

The German swimmers appeared briefly on their terrace, doing stretches with the solemnity of Olympic athletes. I raised my glass in what I hoped was a friendly, non-competitive manner. They nodded back with the restrained warmth of people who had already completed their evening laps and were now preparing for optimal sleep.

I had arrived that afternoon convinced I had made a terrible mess of everything, that my navigation failure was a harbinger of a doomed holiday, that I was fundamentally unsuited to the rural Italian experience. Instead I found myself holding warm bread, exceptional wine, and tomatoes that constituted a personal challenge from a man I had just met. The mishap had become the story. The wrong turn had led somewhere better than the right one ever could have.

Elena appeared at her window and waved, checking I had not drowned in the pool or attempted to drive anywhere else. I waved back with what I hoped looked like competence and contentment. Tomorrow I would attempt to buy cheese, a transaction that would inevitably involve further linguistic chaos, probably some unsolicited family history, and almost certainly another assessment of my footwear. I could not wait.