The satnav gave up on us somewhere between Pescara and nowhere, which is how I found myself wedged down a lane barely wider than a Tesco trolley, arguing with a goat about right of way. The goat won, obviously. It had the moral high ground and significantly more local knowledge. This was my introduction to Castelli di Teramo, or rather to the chaotic twenty minutes preceding my actual arrival at the place.

I had been warned that Abruzzo does not hand itself over easily. You must earn it, apparently, through a combination of wrong turns, mild panic, and the slow realisation that your phone signal has become a charming memory. The property itself, when I finally slewed round the final bend with slightly less dignity than I would have liked, sat perched on its hillside like it had been expecting someone more competent.

The first thing that struck me was the silence. Not the awkward, oppressive kind you get in a dentist's waiting room, but a proper, generous quiet that seemed to wrap around the place. I stood there with my ridiculous wheeled suitcase, still slightly breathless from the goat encounter, and just listened to absolutely nothing much at all. Somewhere distant, a dog barked once, as if checking its watch and deciding the matter could wait.

I had planned, in that organised way you do before a holiday, to visit specific places. Museums, churches, the sort of respectable itinerary you tell people about later. Instead, within an hour of dumping my bag, I went for what I intended to be a brief wander and promptly got myself magnificently lost.

The path behind the property forks in a way that seems straightforward until it absolutely is not. I took what felt like the more interesting option, which is always a mistake if you value knowing where you are. Within twenty minutes I was somewhere that did not appear on my printed map, which I clutched with increasing futility. The map, I should note, had seemed terribly professional back in my kitchen in Sheffield.

The getting lost, though, turned out to be the entire point. I stumbled across a tiny chapel, barely more than a stone shed with a rusted cross, tucked into a fold of hillside that felt completely secret. No sign, no information board, no gift shop. Just a wooden door that creaked open to reveal faded frescoes of saints who looked almost as surprised to see me as I was to find them. I sat on the step for a while, eating the emergency biscuit I had wisely pocketed, and felt genuinely pleased with my complete incompetence at navigation.

Further down, or possibly up, I found a spring where locals apparently collect water in plastic containers. An elderly woman was doing exactly this when I emerged from some bushes looking, I imagine, like someone who had recently escaped custody. She did not seem alarmed. She pointed at my empty hands and made a gesture that clearly meant I was missing a trick, then filled a spare bottle she produced from nowhere and pressed it into my hands. The water tasted of something I cannot describe except to say it made supermarket bottled water taste like a chemical experiment gone wrong.

By the time I found my way back, using the setting sun and a growing hunger as my only guides, I had also discovered an abandoned olive press, a vineyard where no one seemed to be working but the grapes were clearly getting on with it regardless, and a viewpoint that made me stop walking and just stand there like a fool.

That evening, I sat on the terrace with a bottle of Montepulciano that cost less than a London sandwich, and watched the lights of Teramo flicker on in the valley below. I thought about how my planned, sensible holiday would have missed all of this. The chapel, the spring, the vineyard doing its own thing without any audience. I had set out to find Abruzzo and instead let it find me, which seems to be the only method that actually works.

The goat, I like to think, would have approved.