The sat-nav gave up somewhere between Perugia and complete despair, which is how I found myself reversing down a gravel track narrower than my patience, convinced I'd just flattened a row of someone's prized olive saplings. I hadn't, as it turned out, though the elderly gentleman watching from his gate didn't look entirely convinced. He leaned on a fork that had seen more harvests than I've had hot dinners, shook his head slowly, and said something in Italian that I choose to believe was "happens to everyone" rather than the alternative.

I wound down the window with what I hoped was an apologetic grin. "Magione?" I said, pointing vaguely at my phone, which displayed nothing helpful whatsoever.

He set down the fork, walked over, and spent a good thirty seconds studying the screen as though it were a particularly disappointing cheese. Then he looked at me, looked at the car, looked back at the phone, and laughed. Properly laughed, shoulders shaking, the whole performance. "Americana?" he asked.

"English," I admitted.

"Same same," he said, which I suspect was his entire English vocabulary deployed with devastating accuracy. He then proceeded to give directions involving numerous gestures, two mentions of "the big tree that was struck by lightning, you know?", and one reference to his cousin's house that I absolutely did not know but nodded along with anyway. I caught perhaps every third word, but his enthusiasm was infectious enough that I felt genuinely optimistic as I bumped back onto what might generously be called a road.

The magione itself appeared around a bend like something from a half-remembered dream, all honey-coloured stone and terracotta tiles, with a swimming pool glinting in the afternoon sun and cypress trees standing to attention along the drive. I pulled up feeling rather pleased with myself, which lasted approximately eight seconds before realising I'd left my sunglasses on the roof of the car and they were now somewhere on that gravel track, possibly being admired by my new friend with the fork.

The property manager, a woman called Luisa with the efficient manner of someone who has seen every possible holidaymaker malfunction, handed me keys and a folder of information with the solemnity of a priest dispensing sacraments. "You met Aldo," she said, not a question.

"The man with the fork?"

She smiled, the first crack in her professional armour. "Aldo has lived here seventy-two years. He knows when anyone arrives who should not be arriving." She paused, considering this. "Also when they should, but that is less interesting for him."

The magione was one of those properties that manages to be simultaneously rustic and rather grand, with vaulted ceilings and a kitchen you could actually cook in rather than merely heat things miserably. I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of the recently lost-then-found and wandered down to the pool, where I encountered Marco, who was cleaning it with the meditative focus of a man solving the world's problems one leaf at a time.

He spoke no English whatsoever, which proved no barrier to a twenty-minute conversation conducted largely through gestures, drawings in the air, and mutual goodwill. I learned that he had three daughters, that one of them made exceptional pecorino, and that the weather this year was "strange, strange, not right, you understand?" I understood completely, though I couldn't have translated a word of it.

That evening, walking into the village for bread, I passed Aldo again. He was sitting outside his house with two other men of similar vintage, and they fell into a contemplative silence as I approached. Then Aldo raised his hand in greeting, said something to his companions, and all three laughed in that comfortable way of people who have known each other forever and find newcomers a reliable source of amusement.

I bought my bread from a shop where the woman insisted I taste three different cheeses "to understand properly," which I suspect was simply her preferred method of social interaction. By the time I walked back, the sun was dropping behind the hills and the swallows were doing their evening circuits, and I felt something shift in my chest, some tightness I hadn't known I was carrying simply dissolving into the warm air.

I'd arrived convinced that getting lost was the problem. Standing there with bread in one hand and the remains of my dignity in the other, I suspected it might have been the entire point.