I have never been a natural navigator, which is why my partner insisted on doing the driving from Pescara airport to our moscufo in Abruzzo. "You just relax," she said, which is partner-code for "I do not trust you with a map." Fair enough. I once got lost in a multistorey car park in Swindon.

The trouble began not with the driving but with my phone. I had screenshotted the directions, proud of my preparation, only to discover at the crucial roundabout that I had somehow captured a recipe for rabbit ragu instead. We circled twice while I frantically scrolled, my partner's jaw doing that particular tightening it does. A local on a scooter waved us toward a farm track. We followed him. He was going to visit his mother. We ended up in her courtyard, surrounded by chickens, apologising in terrible Italian while she pressed fresh pecorino on us and pointed vaguely east.

By the time we found the actual lane to our moscufo, the sun had dropped behind the Gran Sasso mountains and I had developed what I can only describe as navigation trauma. But then we crested a small rise and there it was: a low stone farmhouse with terracotta tiles, warm light spilling from shuttered windows, and absolutely no sign that anyone else had stayed there this century. The owner, a wiry chap called Enzo, emerged from somewhere with a torch and a bottle of Montepulciano. He showed us the wood-fired oven, the well water, the key that looked like it belonged to a medieval dungeon. "Is quiet here," he said, which turned out to be the understatement of the decade.

Morning revealed what darkness had hidden. We had intended to drive to Pescara for beach supplies, but I took the wrong turning within five minutes. The lane narrowed to a single track between dry stone walls, then became a dirt path through olive groves. My partner sighed that particular sigh. I prepared my defence.

But the path opened onto something extraordinary: a tiny hamlet called Santa Maria del Ponte, though the sign was so weathered it read more like "S...ta M...a del P...e." A single bar occupied the ground floor of someone's house. An old boy in a cloth cap sat outside with a dog that may have been asleep or deceased. We ordered coffees. The barman, who introduced himself as Domenico though everyone called him Mimmo, asked if we had come for the bread. We had not come for the bread. This was apparently hilarious.

Mimmo led us round the back, past a vegetable garden and a chicken coop, to a communal wood oven where a woman called Assunta was sliding loaves in with a peel longer than my arm. She had been baking there every Thursday for forty-seven years. The bread emerged dark and crackling, still singing from the heat. We ate it with oil pressed from the surrounding trees, standing in someone's yard, listening to Mimmo explain that the village had twelve permanent residents and one contested parking space.

We never made it to Pescara. We got lost again trying to leave, following a stream upward through a valley where wild asparagus grew in the banks. We found a hermitage carved into rock, San Giovanni in Venere or something similar, the name long forgotten by whoever maintained the single candle inside. A lizard watched us from the altar. My partner, who had begun the day with that tightened jaw, was now laughing at my complete inability to follow a straight line. "You're like a drunk pigeon," she said, and she was not wrong.

That evening, back at the moscufo, I built a fire in the wood oven with more enthusiasm than skill. The smoke went everywhere except where it should. Enzo appeared at some point, adjusted one brick, and the draught corrected itself. He said nothing. He did not need to. We ate bread from Assunta, cheese from the mother of the scooter man, tomatoes from Mimmo's garden that we had accepted without knowing how to refuse. The stars came out in a quantity I had forgotten existed.

I am still not a natural navigator. I will never be trusted with directions to anywhere important. But in Abruzzo, I learned that being lost is simply another way of arriving somewhere that was never on any map you thought you needed.