Getting to our Gizzeria holiday let was meant to be straightforward. We flew into Lamezia Terme, picked up the hire car, and set off full of that smug energy you get when you think you've beaten the airport chaos. My partner had printed directions. I had Google Maps. What could go wrong?

Everything, apparently. Within twenty minutes we'd managed to miss the same roundabout three times, each lap bringing us face-to-face with a increasingly familiar petrol station where a man in overalls watched us with the weary patience of someone who sees this daily. On the fourth pass, I wound down the window and asked for help in my best phrasebook Italian, which turned out to be mostly Spanish with hand gestures. He pointed us toward the mountains with a look that said "good luck, you'll need it."

The mishap that defined our arrival came when we finally found what we thought was our turning. A narrow track, olive trees on either side, the works. We bumped along for nearly a mile before the track dead-ended at a farmyard where three dogs announced our arrival with the enthusiasm of a town crier. An elderly woman emerged, took one look at our bewildered faces, and without a word pointed back the way we'd come. We reversed the entire mile, my partner white-knuckling the steering wheel while I made apologetic faces at passing goats.

The actual turning, when we found it, was so overgrown with bougainvillea that it looked like a hedge. We nearly missed it again.

But here's the thing about getting properly lost in Calabria. You stumble onto things no guidebook would ever send you to. That wrong track led us past a crumbling Norman tower we'd never have found otherwise, standing alone in a field of wild fennel like something from a dream. We stopped later for directions at a village bar where no one spoke English and ended up drinking homemade limoncello with the owner's cousin, who drew us a map on a napkin that turned out to be more accurate than our sat nav.

The Gizzeria property itself sat on a hillside with views down toward the Gulf of Sant'Eufemia, the kind of vista that makes you forgive every wrong turn. But what struck me most wasn't the view. It was the silence. Proper, deep silence, broken only by cicadas and the occasional church bell from somewhere below. We'd planned day trips to Tropea, to Pizzo, to all the places the internet insists you must see. Instead, we spent our first evening on the terrace with bread from the bakery we'd found by accident, cheese from a farm shop with no sign, and wine from a vineyard the owner's cousin had circled on his napkin map.

I kept thinking about that first hour of driving in circles. How frustrated I'd been, how convinced the holiday was ruined before it began. There's something humbling about getting lost, something that strips away the illusion that you're in control of anything much. You arrive somewhere you didn't plan to be, and sometimes it's better than where you were aiming for.

The next morning we set out with no real destination, just the vague idea of finding the sea. We took wrong turns deliberately after that, following tracks that petered out, doubling back from dead ends, finding tiny coves where fishermen mended nets in the shade of their boats. We found a bakery in a village so small it barely registered on any map, where an old woman sold us still-warm ciambelle and told us about the festa that had happened the week before, the whole village dancing in the square.

I think about that trip differently now. The planned bits blur together. What stays with me are the accidents, the wrong tracks, the conversations in broken Italian, the places we found only because we were lost enough to be looking properly. We arrived at our Gizzeria let frazzled and apologetic, certain we'd wasted half a day. We left a week later with a napkin map in my pocket and the certain knowledge that sometimes the best thing you can do on holiday is surrender your sense of direction entirely.