Landowning involves you in Italian rural life, both social and seasonal. You belong to your neighbourhood as you never would if you were only a visitor. It involves you in the area’s history, too — old boys in the bar tell me stories of my land going back to the Mussolini era.

But be warned: I read an advertisement recently for a tumbledown house in Tuscany that whetted the prospective owner’s appetite with the promise that half an acre of prime Tuscan olive grove would be “completely yours”. In Italian, complete ownership is said to be “d’inferno a cielo” — from hell to heaven.

The Dantesque phrase describes both Italian land law, in which boundaries are reckoned to taper down to the core of the earth, and the subjective reality. Owning land in Italy, deeply satisfying as it is, can be hellish at times. The estate agents, and the “how to” books about buying property in Italy are mostly silent on the pitfalls, costs and responsibilities of possessing land, which means that many British buyers rush into ownership without knowing what they are letting themselves in for.

There are, in fact, strict limits to “complete” ownership. Some buyers imagine they can build on their land, for instance. In Umbria, you must own at least 25 acres before you can even think of building. Even then, there are almost certain to be obstacles. As for fencing your land, it may be your legal right, but in the steeply terraced landscapes of Umbria and Tuscany, fences are few, and are frowned on due to a variety of local interests, particularly the hunters of funghi (who ransack my land in autumn) and wild boar.

Fenced-off farmland implicitly questions the mutual trust and honesty on which Italian country life is based, and is reminiscent of arrogant landlordism and the bad old days of the mezzadria, the feudal system still in existence after the second world war and which was only abolished in the 1970s.

Gardens and allotments are different, as they can be fenced to keep out porcupines and boar. But gardens — land that directly adjoins the house — are rare, and cost more. My own alleged “garden” is really agricultural land, and it is taxed as such. However, as it is by the house, even though a right-of-way runs between it and the house, it cost 20 times as much per square metre to buy as my olive groves, meadow and woodland did.

The tax on land is the least of its expenses. The less work you do on it yourself, the costlier it is. The land must be kept “clean” — pulito, as the Italians say. Unkempt land snags the nets used in olive harvesting. Long grass is a fire hazard, and by law — in Umbria, at least — it must be cut. Only a few local contractors have the specialised machinery for grass-cutting, and every summer I must negotiate with them anew. I have a strimmer, but only for use under the olive trees, where the heavy machinery can’t reach, and for the garden. If I hired someone to strim, the cost of grass-cutting would rise to about £340 a year.

When I bought my property, the land had not been properly tended for years. Huge brambles engulfed many of the olive trees. My worst moments so far have been on cold, rainy winter days, chopping down brambles with a falcetto, or sickle, blood and sweat pouring down my face.

Olive trees need fertilising, spraying with copper salts against disease, and pruning. The pruning is specialist work, costing nearly £7 an hour and can take about 10 days. In winter, the dark mornings and evenings prevent a full working day in the British eight-hour sense of the word, especially as the workers are using sharp saws and other cutting equipment that are difficult to grasp in the raw cold. It is essential to learn how to prune for yourself, and I plan to learn this month — otherwise, my 50 or so olive trees will cost me an extra £400 a year.

We try to hold off the harvest until late November or early December, so that the oil content of the olives gradually increases as the water content diminishes. But there are other factors, notably the weather. You don’t want to harvest when it’s bitterly cold, but you cannot harvest when it’s raining.

The olive mills won’t accept batches of less than half a ton of olives, so I teamed up for the November harvest with my neighbour Valeria. That way, we had oil exclusively from our land. The olives were picked by a local man, Walter, his wife, Grigoria, and father, Dino. Some of the oil paid for the milling, some went to Valeria and me, most went to Walter and his family.

Co-operative arrangements like this are essential. I have another with a local man, a twinkly eyed 83-year-old called Fausto Venturini. In an agreement formalised at the local corpo forestale (forestry department), Fausto and his family will cut my acre of woodland. Under the regulations, a wood may be thinned out every 18 years.

The trees are mostly turkey oak, found everywhere in Umbria. The logs are used in the wood-burning stoves, the smoke from which wreathes the winter air. Half of the expected 26 tons of firewood will be mine. Here is a new aspect to the seasonal self-sufficiency already realised in the figs, peaches and wild cherries of summer, the mushrooms and chestnuts of autumn, and the peppery, rich green olive oil of early winter: the house heated with wood cut from my own land.

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