I have never been more grateful for a sat nav's calm voice than when I found myself driving a hire car up what I can only describe as a goat's idea of a joke. The road to Sovramonte, this little hilltop spot in Veneto, started reasonably enough. Tarmac, signs, the occasional vineyard. Then suddenly the sat nav said "turn left" and I was on a track so narrow that a chap on a scooter coming the other way had to pull into someone's driveway. He did not look surprised. He looked like this happened every Tuesday.

The mishap came five minutes later. I spotted what I thought was the turning for the property, a charming stone building with a wooden balcony that looked exactly like the photos. I got out, stretched my legs, and knocked on the door with the confidence of a man who had definitely booked a holiday let. An elderly woman opened it. She was wearing an apron and holding a rabbit. Not a pet rabbit, mind you. A rabbit of the cooking variety, though at that moment it was still very much in the "before" stage of dinner. She looked at me. I looked at her. I looked at the rabbit. The rabbit looked at nobody, being rather preoccupied with its own situation.

"Buongiorno," I said, which exhausts approximately sixty percent of my Italian.

She replied at length. I caught "next door" and something that might have been "the English always do this." I backed away apologising, returned to the car, and discovered I had parked in front of her son's garage. He emerged, fortyish, wearing a football shirt from a team I did not recognise, and found the whole thing hilarious. He walked me personally to the correct entrance, which was literally twenty metres further up but hidden by a bend and some enthusiastic cypress trees.

The actual property was perfect. Stone walls, wooden beams, that particular coolness that old buildings keep even when the sun is doing its worst. But what made the stay was the people. Maria, the woman with the rabbit, turned out to be the neighbour. By evening she had forgiven me, or perhaps forgotten, because she appeared at the garden fence with a bowl of cherries from her tree. "Too many," she said, though the tree looked quite satisfied with its output. We established through gestures and my terrible Italian that I should return the bowl when empty. I ate the cherries on the balcony watching the light change over the hills, feeling rather pleased with myself for having accidentally befriended someone.

The son, Luca, reappeared the next morning. He was fixing a moped in his driveway and shouted across whether I needed anything from the village. I did not, but I said yes anyway, and ended up following him in my car to a shop so small it had no name, just a door and an ancient cash register. The shopkeeper, a man called Aldo who must have been eighty, spent ten minutes explaining to me why the local cheese was superior to anything from France. He said this in Italian, which I barely followed, but his contempt for French cheese transcended language barriers. Luca translated the good bits and exaggerated the rest.

That evening I sat on the balcony again, Luca having invited himself over with a bottle of wine his father made. We communicated in a mixture of his school English, my phrasebook Italian, and long pauses where we just looked at the view. He told me about leaving Sovramonte for Milan as a young man, hating it, returning within two years. "Too many people," he said. "Too many opinions." Here, he said, people had opinions too, but they were older and therefore somehow more acceptable.

I thought about that. I thought about Maria and her rabbit, about Aldo's cheese nationalism, about Luca fixing his moped in the same driveway where he had learned to ride one as a boy. I had come for the hills and the stone house and the photographs I would take. I had stayed, without quite planning to, for the pleasure of being slightly lost among people who found me amusing and fed me regardless.

The cherries were exceptional, by the way. I returned the bowl on my final morning. Maria accepted it, looked inside as if checking I had not stolen it, and handed me a jar of preserved plums without explanation. I carried them home carefully, wrapped in a shirt, through the airport and across the Channel. They sit in my kitchen now. I have not opened them yet. Somehow it feels like the holiday is not quite finished until I do.