I have never been a natural navigator, and Calabria decided to remind me of this roughly forty minutes after I left Lamezia Terme airport. The hire car sat nav had the confidence of a man who has never once been wrong, which should have been my first warning. It directed me through what I can only describe as a goat track with ambitions, and suddenly there I was, bumper-deep in olive groves, wondering if this was how my holiday would end: as a permanent fixture in someone else's agricultural landscape.

The mishap itself was almost embarrassingly small. I stopped to let an actual goat pass, reached for my water bottle, and knocked my phone down the narrow gap between the handbrake and the seat. There it lodged, still chirping sat nav instructions with increasing hysteria, while I performed what can only be called a yoga position for the inflexible. The goat watched. Judged, probably. By the time I fished it out, I had missed three turnings and found myself in a village that does not appear to have a name, or if it does, the locals have decided to keep it to themselves.

This is where the story should turn annoying, but instead it turned into the whole point of the trip.

I abandoned the sat nav entirely, wound down the windows, and started following my nose, which is not a strategy I would recommend in most contexts but in Calabria seems to work rather well. The smell of woodsmoke and something frying led me down a lane barely wide enough for a determined scooter, and suddenly I was in what I later learned was an old borgo, one of those clustered hillside settlements that time and tourism brochures forgot. An elderly man was sitting outside a doorway, shelling some kind of bean with the focused patience of someone who has never once checked a smartphone. He looked up, nodded as if Americans in hire cars appeared daily, and pointed wordlessly up the hill when I mentioned Polistena.

I never found that village again on any map, which I suspect is exactly how its residents prefer it.

The approach to Polistena itself came as a complete surprise after this accidental detour. I had expected to sweep up to some grand villa with obvious signage and perhaps a fountain. Instead I found myself on a residential street that looked entirely ordinary, then spotted a narrow opening between two houses that revealed the property dropping down behind them, terraces unfolding like a secret. The pool glinted below, invisible from the road, and beyond it the valley opened up in layers of green that no photograph has ever properly captured.

My first evening was spent not exploring planned destinations but simply walking without purpose from the property, letting the steep lanes dictate direction. I found a bakery operating from what appeared to be someone's converted garage, no sign, just the smell of warm bread and a handwritten price list taped to the window. I found a tiny piazza where three men played cards with the intensity of chess grandmasters, barely glancing up as I passed. I found a viewpoint where the whole of the plain below lay spread out, and I stood there until the light changed and changed again, realising I had not thought about work or emails or the various small anxieties I had packed along with my sunscreen.

The property itself rewarded this accidental mindset. The terrace became my headquarters for unplanned mornings, coffee growing cold while I watched a neighbour hang laundry with operatic gestures and considerable opinions about the weather. I took wrong turns on purpose after that first day, found a grove of bergamot trees I would never have located intentionally, discovered a family-run trattoria where no menu existed and the owner simply brought what he had decided was worth eating.

By the end of the week, my phone stayed in my bag for whole afternoons. The sat nav remained sulking and unused. I had become, in a small way, the sort of person who gets gloriously lost and finds it suits them rather well. The goat, I like to think, would have approved.