I have never been a natural navigator, and my arrival in Agropoli proved this beyond any doubt. We had flown into Naples, picked up a hire car that felt roughly the width of a canal boat, and set off south along the coast with the confidence of people who had glanced at a map approximately once. The sat nav, I should mention, had developed what I can only describe as a personality disorder somewhere around Salerno, cheerfully announcing we had reached our destination while we were clearly passing a petrol station on a dual carriageway. My partner, who had been in charge of printing directions as a backup, produced from his pocket a crumpled receipt from Pret a Manger at Gatwick. This was not, as it turned out, terribly helpful.

We found ourselves winding up into the hills above Agropoli proper, the sort of narrow lanes where you meet a goat and have to reverse fifty metres with a sheer drop on one side and an elderly gentleman watching from his doorway with the patient expression of someone who has seen this many times before. The goat, I should add, had right of way. I am still not entirely certain whether we were technically on a road at all, or simply someone's driveway that we had mistaken for a thoroughfare due to our mounting panic.

It was in this state of mild hysteria that we stumbled upon the first of our accidental discoveries. Rounding a bend to let the goat pass, we found ourselves looking down at a tiny chapel, no larger than a garden shed, with a faded blue door and a single candle flickering inside. There was no sign, no indication it existed on any map, just a worn stone step and the smell of wild fennel growing around it. We later learned from a woman selling tomatoes at a roadside stall that this was the Cappella di San Francesco, tended by her grandmother for sixty years, and that tourists never found it because there was simply no reason to look. We sat on the step for twenty minutes, eating the bread and cheese we had packed for the journey, feeling rather pleased with ourselves for being so gloriously lost.

The property itself, when we finally reached it, sat among olive groves with a view that made our earlier suffering feel almost worthwhile. But the real magic, we quickly realised, lay in what we found by wandering without purpose from its front door. One morning, setting off with no particular plan, we took a path that looked like it might lead somewhere and ended up at a small agricultural cooperative where a man named Gennaro was pressing olives from trees his great-grandfather had planted. He spoke no English, we spoke barely any Italian, but through elaborate hand gestures and the universal language of enthusiastic nodding, we spent an hour watching the process and left with a bottle of oil so fresh it was still warm from the press.

Another afternoon, attempting what we believed was a shortcut to the beach, we found ourselves in a valley where an elderly couple were harvesting wild asparagus from the hillside. Rather than shooing us away, they showed us how to spot the shoots among the bracken, and we spent a happy hour scrambling about like incompetent goats ourselves, emerging scratched and triumphant with a modest handful of our own. They invited us back to their simple house for coffee so strong it practically levitated the cup, and we sat on their terrace watching the light change over hills that felt entirely untouched by the modern world.

The beach we had been seeking, when we eventually found it, was not the organised lidos of Agropoli's main stretch but a tiny cove where a single fishing boat was pulled up on pebbles, and an old man was mending nets with the methodical patience of someone who has never once considered hurrying. We swam in water so clear we could see our own feet seeming to hover over sand several metres below, and dried off on rocks that held the heat of the day like stored memory.

I have stayed in places where every moment was planned, every restaurant researched and booked, every sight ticked off with efficient satisfaction. This was not that kind of holiday, and I am unspeakably grateful for our incompetence. The crumpled Pret receipt, the sat nav's betrayal, the goat with superior road awareness - these were the things that forced us away from the obvious and into the accidental. Agropoli and its surrounding hills revealed themselves not through intention but through the happy necessity of finding our way back from wherever we had strayed, and I would not have had it any other way.