The sat nav gave up on us somewhere between Treviso and nowhere, which is how we found ourselves on a road barely wide enough for a determined Vespa, let alone our battered Fiat Panda. I had insisted on driving, naturally, being the one who had once spent a long weekend in Sorrento and therefore considered myself thoroughly Italianised. My partner sat in the passenger seat, clutching a paper map like a talisman and making small whimpering noises every time a tractor appeared from round a blind corner.

We were hunting for a holiday home near Conegliano, a place I had been pronouncing with theatrical confidence all wrong for approximately six months. "Cone-ee-lee-ah-no," I would tell friends, rolling the imaginary word around my mouth like a fine wine. The owner, a chap called Marco who I had emailed in excitable pidgin Italian, had been too polite to correct me.

The mishap, when it came, was spectacularly undramatic. I simply parked where I thought I should, turned off the engine with a flourish, and watched as the car slowly, almost thoughtfully, rolled backwards into a drainage ditch. The handbrake, it transpired, had been a suggestion rather than a commitment for some years. We sat in silence. A dog barked somewhere in the middle distance, presumably in commentary.

Our rescue came in the form of Aldo, who materialised from a neighbouring vineyard with the quiet inevitability of someone who had been watching this unfold for several minutes. He was seventy if he was a day, dressed in trousers held up by what I can only describe as agricultural optimism, and he spoke no English whatsoever. This did not slow him down. Within moments he had summoned his nephew Giacomo, a teenager who communicated exclusively through shrugs and sudden bursts of unexpected helpfulness, and together they had our Panda winched onto solid ground using a tractor, some rope, and what I suspect was profound scepticism about British driving competence.

Marco arrived shortly after, alerted by what I imagine is a highly efficient local grapevine. He was younger than expected, perhaps fifty, with the weathered hands of someone who actually does the work he talks about. He surveyed the scene with the patient expression of a man who had seen worse, then gently corrected my pronunciation of his town. "Coh-nel-YAH-no," he said, twice, watching my lips with the attention of a speech therapist. I have never been more grateful for someone's restraint in not openly laughing.

The property itself sat among vines that Marco's family had tended for generations. His mother, Luisa, appeared from the kitchen with coffee that could have restarted a stopped heart, and proceeded to interrogate us with the fierce tenderness of someone who had decided we needed adopting. She spoke rapid Venetian dialect that even Marco occasionally struggled to translate, gesturing at our car, at the ditch, at the heavens themselves as if seeking divine explanation for British incompetence.

That evening, as the light turned the hills the colour of aged Prosecco, Marco produced a bottle from the cellar and talked about the harvest, about his grandfather's methods, about the way the mist rolls down from the Prealps in October. Giacomo drifted by and actually spoke three consecutive words, which Aldo later told us was practically oratory for the boy. Luisa pressed more food upon us, convinced we were wasting away.

I sat there, slightly bruised in both body and pride, watching these people who had simply accepted our chaotic arrival as an opportunity rather than an intrusion. There is something humbling about being the village entertainment, about your small disasters becoming someone else's pleasant afternoon. I had arrived thinking myself a traveller, seasoned and capable, and within hours had been reduced to a grateful recipient of tractor-based charity, drinking wine I could not pronounce in the company of people I could not properly thank.

It was, I reflected, rather wonderful. Some places reward the competent; Conegliano, it seemed, had a soft spot for the ridiculous.