I have never been so grateful for a sat nav giving up on me as I was on the drive up to Lamon. There I was, humming along to some dreadful Italian radio pop, convinced I was being terribly clever taking a shortcut through the Dolomites, when the screen blinked once and died. Just gave up. Probably the altitude, or perhaps it simply could not cope with my refusal to follow the main road from Belluno. Either way, I was suddenly very alone on a gravel track that seemed to be heading straight up into the clouds.

The mishap came about five minutes later. I rounded a bend, spotted what I thought was a pull-in, and reversed with the confidence of a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing. The crunch was not loud, but it was decisive. I had backed into a wooden post marking someone's vineyard. The post wobbled, sighed, and slowly keeled over like a drunk at closing time. I spent ten minutes trying to right it, which involved a lot of muttering and one stubbed toe, before deciding that Italian vineyard posts probably fall over all the time and driving away very quickly was the mature response.

This is how I found the first of my accidental treasures. In my panic to escape the scene of my agricultural vandalism, I took a left that did not exist on any map I later consulted. The track narrowed to little more than a goat path, hemmed in by larch and pine, and I was genuinely considering whether I would ever see tarmac again when the trees simply stopped. I emerged onto a shelf of meadow with a view that made me forget to breathe. The valley fell away below, terraced with ancient hayfields, and beyond it the pale stone of the Dolomites rose in layers of grey and rose and sudden white. I sat on my bonnet for twenty minutes. A marmot whistled at me. I whistled back, which seemed to confuse it.

I arrived at the house in Lamon in the late afternoon, still slightly trembling from my navigational adventure. The property sits in a hamlet that feels less like a village and more like a handful of houses that happened to agree on a location. My first impression was of profound, almost aggressive quiet. No traffic hum, no distant motorway, just the click of what I later learned were grasshoppers in the meadow behind the house and the occasional cowbell from somewhere up the slope.

I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of a man who had earned his arrival and set out on foot with no destination in mind. This became the pattern. The following morning I wandered up a track behind the house, meaning to walk for half an hour, and found myself three hours later beside a ruined stone barn with a spring bubbling out of the hillside. I drank from my cupped hands like someone in a film, then spent several minutes trying to photograph the water with my phone while a very patient lizard watched.

The joy of Lamon is precisely this absence of design. I found a chapel on my third day, no bigger than a garden shed, with a wooden Madonna inside that someone had carved perhaps two centuries ago and left for whoever happened to pass. I found a bench positioned with such mathematical precision toward a particular mountain view that I laughed aloud at the anonymous person who had carried the planks up and thought, yes, exactly here. I found a bakery in what appeared to be someone's front room, open when the owner felt like it, selling bread that tasted of the wood-fired oven and nothing else.

Each discovery carried the particular pleasure of having no right to expect it. I had done no research. I had followed no recommended route. I had simply got lost, repeatedly and deliberately, and the mountains had responded with these small, perfect gifts.

On my final evening I sat on the terrace with a bottle of local wine, watching the light change on the peaks I still could not name. My sat nav sat in the glove compartment, sulking. I had not turned it on since my arrival. Some things, I had learned, are better found by backing into a vineyard post and fleeing in shame.