I have always believed that the best holidays are the ones where you accidentally take a wrong turn and end up somewhere brilliant. My recent trip to Lido Di Spina on the Emilia Romagna coast proved this theory beyond all doubt, though the initial wrong turn was rather less romantic than I had imagined.

The journey from Bologna airport had been straightforward enough. I had picked up my hire car, a Fiat 500 that felt more like a roller skate than an automobile, and pointed it east toward the coast. The sat nav was behaving itself, the motorway was empty, and I was already dreaming of piadina and cold beer. Then, somewhere around Ravenna, I decided I knew better than Google Maps. I spotted a sign for Comacchio and thought, that looks coastal, I will cut through there. Reader, do not do this. I ended up on a single-track road flanked by salt pans, behind a tractor doing roughly four miles per hour, with a rearview mirror full of increasingly furious Italian drivers. By the time I reached Lido Di Spina, I was forty minutes late, mildly traumatised, and had developed an irrational hatred of agricultural machinery.

The chap handing over the keys to my holiday flat was blessedly unbothered by my tardiness. He simply handed me a cold bottle of water, pointed toward the beach, and said something in rapid Italian that I chose to interpret as "you have arrived in paradise, do not worry." The flat itself was simple, clean, and had a balcony that looked out over pine trees rather than the sea. I was momentally disappointed. Then I opened the balcony door, and the smell hit me. Pine resin, warm earth, and somewhere underneath it all, salt. It was completely unexpected and completely wonderful.

That first evening, I went for what I intended to be a quick stroll to find dinner. I took a left where I should have taken a right, and within five minutes I was hopelessly lost among identical-looking apartment blocks and sandy paths. This is how I found the ciclabile, the coastal cycle path that runs behind the town. It was deserted in the golden hour light, and I followed it without any particular purpose until I stumbled upon a tiny bar tucked between two apartment buildings. No sign, no menu, just an old man grilling sardines on a brazier and a fridge full of local wines. I ate the fish with my fingers, drank something fizzy and white, and watched a family play cards at the next table. The old man refused to tell me the name of the place. "You found it," he said, shrugging. "That is enough."

The next morning, determined to recreate this accidental magic, I set off with no plan whatsoever. I walked south along the beach until the organised rows of umbrellas thinned out and stopped entirely. The beach became wilder, backed by dunes rather than bars, and I found a spot where the water was so shallow you could walk out for fifty metres and still touch the bottom. I lay there floating like a starfish, staring at a sky that seemed impossibly huge. There was nobody else in sight. I had not brought water, or suncream, or any sense whatsoever. I got comprehensively sunburned and slightly dehydrated and I have rarely been happier.

On my third day, I hired a bicycle and promptly got lost again, this time in the pine forest that separates Lido Di Spina from the neighbouring town. The paths forked and forked again, and I had no signal on my phone. I was just beginning to feel genuinely concerned when I emerged into a clearing and found a ruined concrete structure, some kind of wartime bunker half-swallowed by sand and vegetation. Local teenagers had clearly claimed it as their own; there were empty bottles and the remains of a fire. But in the early morning, with sunlight filtering through the pines, it felt like my own private discovery. I sat on the concrete and ate the apricots I had bought from a roadside stall, juice running down my wrists, and felt that particular satisfaction of being temporarily unfindable.

I did eventually find my way back, and I did eventually visit the proper attractions. I ate excellent seafood at established restaurants. I swam in the organised beach areas with their neat rows of sun loungers. I even took a boat trip around the Comacchio lagoons, which were genuinely spectacular. But it is the unplanned moments that stay with me. The nameless bar, the empty beach, the bunker in the woods. I went to Lido Di Spina expecting a straightforward beach holiday and found something better: proof that getting lost is not a failure of navigation but a different kind of destination altogether.