The drive down to Polistena from Lamezia Terme airport had been going suspiciously well, which in my experience is always a warning sign. My hire car, a Fiat 500 that felt like driving a wheeled biscuit tin, had behaved itself admirably through the motorway curves. My phone was charged, the sat nav was speaking in a reassuringly calm British accent, and I had even remembered to pack my driving licence. Then, exactly three miles from the property, I took what I thought was a clever shortcut.

It was not a clever shortcut.

What started as a promising little road quickly narrowed to something a goat would hesitate to attempt. I found myself crawling between ancient stone walls with about six inches of clearance on either side, wondering if I was technically still on a road or had accidentally driven into someone's garden. A tiny nonna appeared from a doorway, watched me with folded arms and what I can only describe as profound disappointment, then wordlessly pointed back the way I had come. I reversed for what felt like half a mile, sweating profusely, until I reached a junction where three identical-looking lanes offered themselves with no distinguishing features whatsoever. I chose one at random. This became something of a theme for the week.

The property itself, when I finally found it, was up a steep lane on the edge of Polistena's old centre. A heavy wooden door set into weathered stone, a small terrace with terracotta pots, and views down towards the valley that made my earlier humiliation almost worthwhile. Almost. I dumped my bags and did what any sensible person would do: went out to get deliberately lost.

Polistena is not a place that yields its secrets easily, which is precisely why it rewards the wandering approach. I headed down a flight of steps I had not noticed on the way in, simply because they looked invitingly mysterious. They led to a tiny piazza where four old men sat on plastic chairs playing cards with the intensity of chess grandmasters. They ignored me completely, which I took as a sign of acceptance. A doorway nearby advertised bread, though the sign looked older than I was. Inside, a woman was pulling golden filoni from a wood-fired oven that must have been burning since the 1950s. I pointed, she wrapped, I paid with coins I did not recognise. The bread was still warm when I tore into it on a bench overlooking a view I had not expected to find.

The next morning I set out with no map and no plan, which is how I discovered the ruined monastery. I had been aiming vaguely for what I thought was a path to the main road and instead found myself climbing through overgrown terraces of olive trees, the silver-green leaves brushing my shoulders. The building appeared suddenly, half-collapsed and covered in climbing roses that had gone feral. No signs, no information boards, no other visitors. Just me, the crumbling walls, and the distant sound of someone calling chickens. I sat on a fallen column and ate the remains of my filone, feeling like an accidental archaeologist.

Getting lost in Polistena's backstreets became my daily ritual. I found a barber shop that also sold lottery tickets and homemade wine, the proprietor moving between tasks with the easy rhythm of decades. I found a workshop where an old man was carving wooden spoons by hand, shavings curling around his feet like golden snow. I found a viewpoint that was definitely someone's private garden, though they waved me in cheerfully enough when they saw me peering through the gate. Each discovery came with the particular satisfaction of knowing I could never find it again if I tried, which somehow made it more precious.

By my fourth day, I had stopped attempting to navigate altogether. I would pick a direction based on which street looked more shadowed, more crooked, more likely to contain something unexpected. This is how I ended up at the communal washhouse, a stone structure where women once did their laundry together, now quietly returning to nature. A cat slept on the edge. Water still trickled through channels worn smooth by generations of scrubbing. I had seen nothing about it in any guide, and that felt exactly right.

On my final evening, I sat on the terrace with a bottle of local Greco and tried to retrace my wanderings on a map. I could not locate half the places I had found. The monastery remained unmarked. The spoon carver's workshop existed in a spatial dimension apparently unrelated to cartography. Even the bread woman's oven had somehow relocated itself in my memory. I realised I had spent a week collecting experiences that were deliberately, beautifully unrepeatable.

The drive back to the airport was straightforward, which seemed wrong somehow. I took one wrong turn deliberately, just to see what would happen, and found myself on that same goat track from my first day. The same nonna was in her doorway. She shook her head, but I swear I saw her smile this time.