Getting to Orvieto was always going to be an adventure, though I had not planned for the adventure to begin with me trying to reverse a hire car down a cobbled lane barely wider than a shopping trolley while three elderly Italian men watched from a doorway, smoking in perfect unison and offering contradictory hand gestures. I had missed the turning for the property, you see, distracted by a sign for pecorino cheese that I am still convinced winked at me. The sat nav had given up five miles back, sighing "you have reached your destination" while I was clearly in someone's olive grove, surrounded by trees that looked deeply unimpressed.

When I finally found the place, rattled and smelling faintly of clutch, I was met by Renato, the caretaker, who opened the gate with the theatrical weariness of a man who had witnessed this exact scene roughly four thousand times. He was seventy if he was a day, dressed in trousers held up by what I can only describe as optimism and a belt, and he spoke English in the manner of someone who had learned it exclusively from wartime films and American soap operas. "You are the English," he announced, not as question but as gentle accusation. "You come for the quiet. The English always come for the quiet. Then they find the quiet and they are afraid." I could not tell if this was a joke or a prophecy.

He showed me round the property with the unhurried pace of a man who had nowhere else to be for the remainder of his natural life. The pool, he explained, was "not for the jumping," a rule he had apparently invented on the spot. The outdoor kitchen was "for the meats," though he looked at me with visible doubt about my capabilities in this department. When I mentioned I was vegetarian, he crossed himself, though whether for my soul or his inconvenience I shall never know.

That evening I walked into the village, if one can call a scattering of houses and one determined shop a village, and found myself in what passed for the local bar. There I met Silvana, who ran the place with her sister and who possessed the remarkable gift of making you feel simultaneously like family and like a mild disappointment she was prepared to tolerate. She was knitting something aggressive when I arrived, needles clicking with what I can only describe as moral authority. "You are the one at Renato's place," she said, again that statement of fact, as though the village operated some ancient telegraph system of newcomers. "He says you do not eat the meats. He is worried you will die." I explained about lentils and she made a noise like a disappointed radiator.

By the second evening I was something of a regular, which in a village this size meant simply that I had appeared twice and had not set fire to anything. A man called Beppe joined us, seventy-five, retired from something he never specified, carrying a dog under his arm like a handbag. The dog, he informed me, was also called Beppe. "It is simpler this way," he said, as though this explained everything. He had opinions about Brexit, most of them involving fish, and he expressed them at length while Silvana's knitting needles provided a rhythmic counterpoint of scepticism.

What struck me, sitting there with my wine that cost less than bottled water back home, was how these strangers had already constructed a version of me that I was not entirely sure I recognised. To Renato I was the anxious English driver, to Silvana the peculiar non-meat-eater, to Beppe some representative of a political catastrophe he had read about in a newspaper from 2019. None of them were quite right, yet somehow all of them were fair, and I found myself performing these roles with increasing commitment, as one does when staying in a place small enough that your reputation arrives before you do.

On my last morning, Renato found me packing the car with the same theatrical timing he applied to everything. "You survived the quiet," he said, and I honestly could not tell if he was pleased or faintly disappointed. He pressed a jar of honey into my hands, honey from his own bees, which apparently he kept somewhere secret and slightly threatening. "For the remembering," he said. "Also, the bees do not care if you eat the meats."

I drove away more carefully than I arrived, waving at Silvana who was already clicking her needles at some new arrival's misdemeanour, and at Beppe who was walking Beppe in what I now understood to be their daily constitutional. The sat nav remained silent, perhaps exhausted, perhaps finally respectful of a place that refused to be found by anyone who was not already, in some sense, lost.