I'd driven from Pescara airport with the sort of confidence that only comes from having watched someone else do something once on telly. My hire car, a Fiat 500 that handled like a shopping trolley with ambition, had carried me through the Abruzzo countryside without major incident. That should have been my first warning.

The sat nav died precisely three miles from Civitella del Tronto. Not politely, with a "recalculating" and a dignified fade. No, it froze on a map of somewhere near Bologna, which is roughly the Italian equivalent of being directed to Inverness when you're trying to find Brighton. I pressed buttons. I swore. I pressed more buttons with increasing theatricality. The screen remained stubbornly fixed on a road I would never, ever drive.

So I did what any sensible person does in a foreign country with no signal: I followed instinct, which in my case is less "inner compass" and more "stubborn refusal to admit defeat."

The road narrowed. Then it narrowed again, until I was squeezing past stone walls that had clearly been built when horses were the widest vehicles in circulation. I passed a field of sheep who looked at me with the collective expression of locals watching a tourist make a predictable mistake. One of them, a particularly judgmental-looking ewe, maintained eye contact for an uncomfortable length of time.

I was, without question, lost.

The village I stumbled into was not Civitella del Tronto. It was, according to a weathered sign, something ending in "-eto" that I couldn't properly pronounce. But it had a tiny bar, the kind with three stools and an espresso machine that probably predated the unification of Italy. I ordered a coffee through a combination of pointing and apologetic smiling. The barman, a man whose face suggested he'd seen many people exactly like me, gave me directions that involved numerous hand gestures and the repeated word "su," which I took to mean "up."

Up it was. The road climbed through terraces of olive trees that looked like they'd been planted by patient giants, their trunks twisted into shapes that no amount of pruning could explain. I passed a ruined farmhouse with a fig tree growing through its roof, the fruit already swelling in the late September heat. A lizard the size of my forearm sunned itself on a wall and didn't bother moving as I passed.

Then, quite suddenly, there was the house. Not the one I'd booked, but a cluster of stone buildings that made me pull over simply to look. A woman was hanging laundry in a courtyard, and the scene was so perfectly composed that I felt rude witnessing it. She waved. I waved back, the British instinct to apologise for my own eyesight kicking in immediately.

The actual property, when I finally found it, sat on a hillside with views that made my earlier panic feel almost worthwhile. The stone walls were the colour of honey left in the sun. A terrace jutted out over nothing in particular, and that nothing was extraordinary: layers of hills fading into blue distance, the sort of view that makes you understand why people paint landscapes rather than photograph them.

I unloaded my case, which contained approximately fourteen items I wouldn't need and nothing useful like a corkscrew or a functioning sense of direction. The key had been left in a flowerpot, because of course it had. This is the sort of place where people still trust each other, where the biggest security concern is a curious goat.

That evening, I walked without purpose, which is to say I got lost again on purpose this time. A path behind the house led through scrub oak and down to a stream I could hear before I could see. The water ran over flat stones worn smooth, and someone had placed a single plastic chair on the bank, facing downstream. I sat in it without questioning who had put it there or why. A kingfisher flashed past, that impossible blue that always looks painted rather than feathered.

I thought about the sat nav, still frozen in my glovebox. I thought about the sheep, the lizard, the woman with her laundry, the empty chair waiting by water. I'd planned nothing of this day beyond arrival and unpacking. The mishap had become the story, the wrong turns had become the point.

The house waited above me, lights just coming on in the dusk. Somewhere, a dog barked once and thought better of continuing. I stayed in the chair until I couldn't see the stones in the stream anymore, until the hills had absorbed all the remaining light and become shapes rather than places.

Finding your way by losing it first, I decided, was not the worst approach to a holiday. Not the worst approach to rather a lot of things, if I'm honest.