I have never been a natural navigator, and my journey to our holiday let in Cattolica proved this beyond all doubt. We had flown into Bologna, picked up the hire car, and set off full of that particular optimism that comes from a decent in-flight wine and the promise of a week doing very little. The sat nav had other ideas. Somewhere near Rimini it decided we needed a scenic route, which in sat nav language apparently means "abandon all hope." Three wrong turns and one deeply confusing roundabout later, we found ourselves in what I can only describe as a field of sunflowers that seemed to stretch to infinity. My partner gave me that look. You know the one. The "I told you to download the map" look.

We eventually stumbled upon Cattolica from entirely the wrong direction, which is rather fitting given how the rest of the week unfolded. The property itself, a modest apartment in a residential block, revealed itself gradually through a tangle of backstreets I would never have found deliberately. A local chap on a scooter, seeing my increasingly desperate three-point turns, finally took pity and waved us through an archway I would have sworn was a private driveway. It was not. It was, in fact, the most direct route to our destination, known apparently to everyone except satellite technology and yours truly.

The apartment was simple, clean, and possessed of a balcony that caught the afternoon sun in a way that immediately forgave the morning's chaos. I stood there with a warm beer from the corner shop, watching neighbourhood life unfold below, and felt that particular satisfaction of having arrived somewhere without really understanding how. The mishap had become the introduction. The wrong turns had shown us the sunflowers, the scooter gentleman, the archway shortcut. I began to suspect that getting lost might be the entire point.

This suspicion hardened into conviction over the following days. We set out each morning with vague intentions and no particular route. The beach, obviously, was the obvious draw, and Cattolica's stretch of sand is perfectly pleasant in that unpretentious, family-oriented way that Italian seaside towns do so well. But we kept wandering away from it, drawn by alleyways and the suspicion that something more interesting lurked just around the next corner.

One afternoon, attempting to find a recommended gelateria, we took a left that should have been a right and found ourselves in a pocket of agricultural land barely five minutes from the town centre. An elderly gentleman was tending tomato plants that reached improbable heights, and upon seeing our confusion, he simply handed us two of the ripest specimens I have ever encountered. We ate them like apples, standing in the lane, juice running down our wrists. The gelateria was never found. I do not regret this.

Another wrong turn led us to a community bread oven, still in use, where local women gather weekly to bake in the old way. We were not invited to participate, exactly, but neither were we chased away. We watched from a respectful distance, breathing in that extraordinary smell, until one woman pressed a still-warm piece into my hand with a gesture that needed no translation.

By the week's end, I had abandoned the sat nav entirely. We found a tiny harbour where fishermen mended nets in the early morning, a bar that served only local wines and seemed genuinely surprised by our presence, and a vegetable garden squeezed improbably between two apartment blocks that supplied a restaurant we never would have discovered otherwise. Each find came from hesitation, from taking the path that looked less certain, from trusting that confusion might be a kind of guidance.

I returned home with a slightly sunburnt nose, a new appreciation for tomatoes eaten properly, and the reluctant admission that my terrible sense of direction might actually be a gift I never asked for. Cattolica, I suspect, is full of such accidental discoveries for anyone willing to miss their turn. I intend to miss many more.