I have never been so relieved to see a set of traffic lights as I was when we finally crawled into Cattolica. Six hours from Bologna airport, thanks to a sat-nav that decided "scenic route" meant "let's tour every industrial estate between here and the Adriatic." My partner Dave was driving, white-knuckled, while I clutched a melting packet of motorway panettone and tried not to mention that I might have typed the postcode in wrong. I definitely had. The panettone was not the only thing melting by that point.

We were booked into a little holiday home near the marina, nothing fancy, just somewhere with a terrace and the promise of a washing machine after two weeks of camping. The key collection was meant to be straightforward. It was not. The agent's office had moved, apparently, though nobody had thought to update the website. Dave stood in a pharmacy doorway, gesturing wildly at Google Maps while I attempted high-school Italian on a bemused local who just wanted to buy his blood pressure tablets in peace. We found the new office eventually, tucked behind a gelateria that would later become very significant in our lives.

The property itself was up a narrow street that our hire car absolutely would not fit down. We abandoned it in what I optimistically called a parking space and dragged our cases past mopeds and potted lemon trees. Then we turned a corner and there it was, a modest peach-coloured building with shutters the colour of faded terracotta. A cat sat on the wall like it had been waiting specifically for us. Dave said it looked judgmental. I said it looked Italian. Same thing, really.

The terrace was what sold me instantly. Not huge, but positioned just so, catching the afternoon light and overlooking a tangle of backstreets that seemed to go nowhere in particular. I dumped my case and immediately got lost trying to find a bin for the panettone wrapper. This became a theme.

That first evening, we wandered without purpose, which is how we found the piadina kiosk. Not the one on the main promenade with the laminated menus in six languages. This was a hole in the wall near the old fishing harbour, run by a woman called Carla who spoke rapid dialect and made flatbreads to order on a domed griddle that looked older than me. We pointed at things hopefully. She rolled her eyes and made us something with squacquerone cheese and arugula that I still think about in quiet moments. No TripAdvisor review would ever find her. We found her because I was trying to locate a cash machine and took a wrong turn past a shuttered boatyard.

The next morning, determined to reach the beach properly, we got lost again. The coast here is odd, full of sudden inlets and pocket marinas that interrupt the sand. We ended up in a cove where locals were fishing with handlines off a concrete jetty, sharing a single umbrella and a bottle of something homemade. An old man showed Dave how to hold the line, patient as a grandfather, while I sat on a wall and watched a heron watch us all. We never learned the cove's name. The heron, I suspect, knew it perfectly well.

By day three, we stopped trying to plan. The holiday home became our base for deliberate wandering. We would head out with water and uncomfortable shoes and see where dead ends took us. A bakery that only opened before seven, selling brioche still warm from the oven. A communal garden where someone had planted tomatoes in an old fishing boat. A bar that served espresso and sold buttons, because why not. Each discovery felt stolen, unearned, the reward for poor navigation and worse Italian.

Dave developed a theory that the entire Emilia Romagna coast was designed by someone who disliked straight lines. Roads curve, walls crumble at angles, even the pine trees lean as if exhausted. I loved it. My usual need for order, for knowing exactly where dinner reservations sit in the evening's schedule, slowly dissolved into something more like curiosity. Getting lost stopped being failure and started being method.

On our last day, I tried to find that gelateria near the key office, the one that had become our landmark. I failed, naturally. Took a left where I should have taken a right, ended up in a square with a fountain full of cigarette butts and one magnificent magnolia tree. Sat on a bench. Watched a woman hang washing from a fourth-floor window, shirts and sheets ballooning in the sea breeze like flags of a country nobody had bothered to name.

Dave found me eventually, guided by the time-honoured method of walking in increasingly worried circles. We never did locate that gelateria. We found a different one, equally good, equally unmarked on any map I have seen since.

The panettone, incidentally, was disgusting. Industrial, claggy, the kind of thing you buy at motorway services in desparation. I thought about it on the flight home, wedged between a snoring businessman and a toddler with impressive lung capacity. Some things you find by accident are treasures. Some are just reminders that you should have stopped at the better service station. The trick, I am learning, is telling the difference, and being grateful for both.