I'd set my heart on a week in Campania, picturing myself sipping limoncello on a sun-drenched terrace, so when the train from Naples dumped me at Paestum station with a rucksack full of optimism and precisely zero grasp of Italian bus timetables, I felt rather pleased with my adventurous spirit. That lasted eleven minutes. I marched confidently left, then right, then left again, following what I believed was a shortcut through an olive grove. It was not. It was someone's driveway. Three someones, actually, and a very committed guard dog who seemed personally offended by my Ordnance Survey approach to navigation.

The mishap that truly defines this holiday, though, happened when I finally found the property. I'd been trudging along a dusty track, convinced I was pioneering a new route, when I spotted a sign for "Paestum IKC088" pointing down what looked like a farm track. I strode past it. Too obvious, I thought. Too straightforward. I carried on for another twenty minutes, growing increasingly heroic in my own mind, before accepting that the sign had been correct and I had, in classic fashion, outsmarted myself into a forty-minute detour. The owner, Marco, greeted me with the knowing smile of a man who has watched many Britons arrive flustered and over-proud. He said nothing. He didn't need to.

The property itself sits in that glorious hinterland between Paestum's ancient temples and the Cilento coast, surrounded by buffalo mozzarella farms that fill the morning air with a scent I can only describe as agricultural honesty. My first evening, determined to redeem my navigational reputation, I set out to find dinner without consulting my phone. This was, in retrospect, a continuation of my earlier error. I wandered down lanes that grew progressively narrower, past crumbling farmhouses and lemon trees heavy with fruit, until I stumbled upon a tiny family trattoria with no name, no menu, and a grandmother in the kitchen who simply pointed at what she was cooking. I ate the best pasta of my life. I have no idea what it was called. I couldn't find it again if you paid me.

That became the pattern of the week. Getting lost on purpose, then getting more lost by accident, then finding something I hadn't known to look for. One morning I took a wrong turning towards what I thought was the beach and ended up at a ruined tower, Torre Sinarca, standing alone in a field of wildflowers. A local man was there with his dog, and though we shared perhaps forty words between his English and my phrasebook Italian, he told me the tower had watched over these fields since the fifteenth century. I sat there for an hour. I would never have found it deliberately.

Another afternoon, attempting to reach the temples by a back route I'd invented, I found myself in a smallholding where an elderly couple were making mozzarella by hand. They waved me in with the casual generosity that still astonishes me about rural Italy. I watched the curd stretched and shaped, tasted it still warm, and left with cheese I hadn't paid for and directions I couldn't follow.

By the end of the week, I'd stopped trying to plan. The temples themselves, when I finally reached them properly, were magnificent, but it was the accidental moments that stayed with me. The unnamed lane that led to a shrine tucked into a limestone cliff. The bakery I found when a rainstorm forced me to shelter in a doorway I'd mistaken for a shop. The swimming spot where locals gathered at dusk, which I discovered only because I'd taken a wrong fork on a coastal path.

I arrived at Paestum convinced that good travel required competence and preparation. I left understanding that my finest holiday moments came from incompetence, from the willingness to walk past the sign and accept the consequences, from trusting that getting lost in Campania rarely means staying lost for long. Marco waved me off with that same knowing smile. I suspect he understood something about this place that took me a week to learn. The best directions are the ones you don't follow.