I have never been so grateful for a sat nav with a sense of humour as I was driving to our villa in Barbarano, Veneto. Three hours out of Venice Marco Polo and I was already convinced I had taken a wrong turn somewhere near Padua. The roads narrowed, the vines thickened, and at one point I found myself behind a tractor whose driver appeared to be having a full telephone conversation while balancing a crate of wine bottles on his knee. I did not overtake. I have some survival instincts.

The mishap came five minutes from our destination. I spotted what I thought was the turning, swung the hire car down a gravel track with theatrical confidence, and immediately realised I was in someone's private olive grove. A small dog announced my arrival with operatic fury. An elderly man emerged from a shed, wiping his hands on a rag, looking less annoyed than simply curious about what kind of idiot drives a Fiat Panda into his livelihood. I wound down the window and attempted my best "mi dispiace," which sounded, in retrospect, like an apology delivered by a frightened goose. He squinted at me, then burst out laughing. Not cruel laughter. The sort of laughter you reserve for puppies walking into glass doors.

"Barbarano?" he said, pointing back up the track. "Sempre dritto. Sempre." Always straight. He said it twice, which I now understand was prophecy. I would need reminding.

The villa itself, when I finally found it, sat among cypress trees like someone had painted it there and forgotten to tell anyone. My partner was already out of the car, stretching, pretending she had not noticed my forty-minute detour. The key was in a lockbox with a code that worked on the third attempt, which I counted as a personal victory.

We met our first proper character that evening. Giovanni ran the nearest alimentari, a shop so compact you had to breathe in to reach the cheese fridge. He spoke English like someone who had learned it exclusively from American films and elderly British tourists, resulting in sentences like "You are wanting the mozzarella, yes? Is very fresh, today. I am making the recommendation." He had opinions about everything. Our choice of wine. The weather forecast. A neighbour who had painted his house yellow. "Is not correct," Giovanni said, with the gravity of a man discussing war crimes. "Is not colour for this village." I bought three bottles and a salami I did not need, mostly because disagreeing with him seemed socially impossible.

The next morning brought Carla, who delivered the bread. She arrived on a scooter that sounded like an angry wasp in a tin can, wearing sunglasses that could have shielded a fighter pilot. She had lived in Barbarano her entire life, which she announced as both explanation and warning. "You are from London?" she asked, looking at me as if I had admitted to something embarrassing. "I went once. Too much walking. Here, we have the sitting." She gave me a loaf still warm from the oven and refused payment, waving me off with a gesture I have since tried and failed to replicate. It involved her entire forearm and implied generations of dismissal.

By day three I had become a minor celebrity at the village bar, which opened at six in the morning for coffee and closed whenever the owner felt like it. A man called Renato, who I suspect never actually worked anywhere, held court at the corner table with a tiny dog on his lap and a newspaper he never read. He insisted on teaching me card games I did not understand, shouting "Bravo!" whenever I played a card, any card, with sufficient commitment. His friend Enzo, who had hearing difficulties and a moustache like a well-tended hedge, would then argue that I had played incorrectly, and the two of them would debate this for twenty minutes while I sat there like a prop in their ongoing sitcom.

What struck me, gradually, was how little anything here was performed for outsiders. These were not quaint local colour figures assembled for my holiday narrative. They were simply people being themselves in a place where that still seemed sufficient. I found myself wondering when I had last spent time somewhere that did not feel, in some way, like an audition.

On our final evening, Giovanni closed his shop early and produced a bottle of something homemade and potentially illegal. Renato appeared from nowhere, as he always did. Even the man from the olive grove wandered past, recognised my car apparently by its dented confidence, and nodded with what I chose to interpret as forgiveness. We sat on plastic chairs outside the villa, passing glasses, misunderstanding each other in several languages simultaneously, and watching the light change over the vines.

I had arrived in Barbarano by accident, more or less literally. I left feeling slightly less like a person who needed to arrive anywhere with quite so much purpose.