I have never been very good with directions, which is how I found myself reversing a hire car down a single-track road in the Dolomites while a very patient local farmer waited with his tractor and what I can only describe as an expression of long-suffering amusement. I had been aiming for Moena, you see. I had the satnav, I had the postcode, I had even written directions on a scrap of paper. What I did not have, apparently, was any ability to distinguish left from right when flustered.

The road I wanted was the second left after the church. I took the first left after something that looked vaguely church-ish but turned out to be a barn. By the time I realised my error, the tarmac had given up entirely and I was committed to a gravel track that grew narrower with every metre. The farmer, when I finally backed far enough to let him pass, just laughed and pointed back the way I had come. "Tutti perduti qui," he said. Everyone gets lost here. I decided to take it as a compliment.

When I finally found the property, tucked among larch and pine with the pale limestone peaks rising behind it, I understood why people might not mind the confusion. The place had that particular stillness of mountain villages, the kind where you can hear a door latch click three houses away. My first act was to abandon the car entirely and walk, partly to stretch my legs after the journey, partly because I no longer trusted myself with navigation.

That walk became the pattern of my stay. Each morning I would set out with vague intentions and no map, following paths that started as proper trails and degenerated into something more tentative. I found a meadow above the village where someone had left a wooden bench facing the Val di Fassa, positioned with the precision of a person who had spent many evenings deciding exactly where the light fell best at six o'clock. I sat there for an hour watching clouds move across the Sassolungo group, doing absolutely nothing, and felt genuinely pleased with myself for having achieved this level of productive idleness.

Another afternoon, taking what I thought was a shortcut back from the village centre, I wandered into a hamlet I never properly identified. There was a chapel with a rusted bell, a water trough with moss growing in the cracks, and an elderly woman hanging laundry who nodded at me as if Americans appearing from nowhere were a daily occurrence. I smiled, she smiled, and I walked on before my Italian could disappoint us both.

The food I found by accident was consistently better than anything I planned. A bakery I stumbled into while searching for a cash machine produced apple strudel that I ate on a wall in the sun, powdered sugar down my front, feeling no shame whatsoever. A tiny bar near a bus stop I had been trying to locate served speck and cheese on rough bread that made me reconsider every sandwich I had ever eaten in my life.

By the third day I stopped trying to know where I was going. The Dolomites, I realised, reward the wandering. The proper walks are spectacular, of course, the organised routes with their signs and their views. But there is something particular about finding your own path, about rounding a corner and discovering a view that belongs only to you in that moment, because no one told you to look for it.

I thought about this on my final evening, sitting on the property's terrace with a glass of Teroldego and the sound of cowbells drifting up from somewhere below. My whole life, I have been a person who plans, who checks, who confirms the route twice before setting out. Here I had done the opposite at every turn, and it had given me everything.

The farmer on the first day had been right. Getting lost here is not a mistake. It is the whole point.