The sat-nav gave up somewhere between Perugia and complete existential despair, which is how I found myself down a gravel track, nose-to-nose with a very unimpressed goat. I'd been aiming for a magione near Lake Trasimeno, one of those fortified farmhouses that promise rustic charm and probably a questionable shower. Instead, I had hoof prints on my bonnet and a growing certainty that I'd missed a turning three miles back.

Turning the hire car around involved a seventeen-point manoeuvre that I'm fairly certain the goat enjoyed more than I did. By the time I reached the actual property, a handsome stone building with terracotta roofs and the sort of creeping vines that Instagram dreams are made of, I was forty minutes late and slightly hysterical. I honked apologetically. Nothing. I tried again, more sheepishly. Still nothing. I was contemplating sleeping in the car when a door creaked open and out shuffled Renato, who must have been somewhere north of eighty and was wearing a flat cap that had seen better decades.

"You are the English," he announced, not as a question. "I thought maybe you drown in the lake. Many English drown." I started to explain about the goat. He waved this away. "Goats are bastards. Come."

Inside, the magione was everything promised and more: vaulted ceilings, terracotta floors, a kitchen that smelled of woodsmoke and something garlicky. Renato showed me the wood-fired oven with the reverence usually reserved for religious artefacts, then produced a bottle of his own red with a label handwritten in what I initially thought was Italian but later realised was simply illegible. "You drink," he commanded. I drank. It was extraordinary. I told him so. He shrugged. "Is wine. From grapes. What else?"

The next morning I met his wife, Luisa, who appeared silently at my elbow while I was attempting to operate the coffee maker with the wrong kind of pod. She watched my struggle for a full minute without comment, then took the machine from me and performed some ritual that produced perfect espresso. "You have soft hands," she observed. "Office hands. My grandson has office hands. He makes websites." She said "websites" the way one might say "necromancy." "I tell him, learn the oven. The oven will not fire you. The oven does not have... what is it... restructuring." She made a sound like a small explosion, which I took to represent corporate redundancy.

Over the following days, a sort of informal council of locals materialised at the magione. There was Marco, Renato's nephew, who drove a Vespa that sounded like an angry wasp and delivered fresh bread each dawn with the solemnity of a priest administering communion. He spoke almost exclusively in proverbs, most of which I failed to understand. "The fox changes his fur but not his habits," he told me, handing over a still-warm ciabatta. I nodded sagely, though to this day I haven't worked out if this was commentary on my driving, my diet, or simply foxes.

Then came Paola from the neighbouring property, who arrived unannounced with a bowl of just-harvested olives and proceeded to interrogate me about British politics with a thoroughness that would shame most journalists. "Your prime minister," she said, narrowing her eyes, "he is like our Berlusconi, yes? But with worse suits?" I attempted a nuanced explanation. She snorted. "Politicians. All bastards. Like goats." I was beginning to detect a theme in Umbrian philosophy.

The most unexpected character was an Australian expat called Bruce, who'd washed up in the area fifteen years prior and now ran olive oil tours with the fervour of a convert. He found me one afternoon attempting to identify birds with a phone app, which was identifying everything as "possibly a sparrow, possibly a mistake." Bruce took the phone, deleted the app, and handed me a pair of binoculars. "Mate," he said, with the gentle disappointment of someone who'd seen too much, "technology's ruined more walks than rain ever did." He then spent two hours teaching me to distinguish between fourteen varieties of warbler, most of which looked identical to my eye but which he described with such affectionate specificity that I almost believed I could see the differences.

On my final evening, Renato produced another bottle and we sat on the terrace watching the sun settle over the lake like someone slowly lowering themselves into a hot bath. Luisa brought out bread and that intense local oil, and for a while nobody spoke. It was Marco who broke the silence, arriving on his wasp-Vespa with a torta al testo still steaming from the griddle. "The fish dies by its mouth," he announced, distributing the flatbread. I caught Bruce's eye. He shrugged almost imperceptibly. Some proverbs, I suppose, simply don't translate.

As I packed the next morning, Luisa appeared with a jar of her preserved tomatoes and a look that managed to be both stern and fond. "You come back," she said. It wasn't a request. Renato shook my hand with formal gravity, then pressed a second bottle of illegible wine upon me with the instruction to "drink with someone who has good hands, not office hands."

I thought about that drive home, about the goat I'd never see again, about how I'd arrived flustered and slightly broken and was leaving somehow more flustered but differently so, patched together with good wine and strange proverbs and the particular kindness of people who have nothing to prove. The sat-nav worked perfectly on the return journey. I ignored it twice, just to see what I might find.