I should have known the holiday proper started the moment our sat-nav gave up somewhere between Bologna and the middle of absolutely nowhere. We'd been winding through the Apennine foothills for the best part of an hour, my partner navigating with the confidence of someone who'd glanced at a map precisely once, when the screen froze on a pixelated goat and the voice announced we'd reached our destination. We had not. We were parked outside what appeared to be a tractor shed with a very committed wasp problem.

The mishap, though, turned out to be the making of the trip. Rather than panic, we did what any sensible British motorist does in a crisis: drove slowly in circles until something looked familiar. Ten minutes of increasingly tense silence later, we crested a hill and found ourselves staring down at Loiano, a proper little stone village tucked into the sort of landscape that makes you forget you were ever stressed about anything. The sat-nav might have abandoned us, but we'd accidentally discovered the back way in, through a lane so narrow I had to fold the wing mirrors.

Our villa sat just above the village proper, a converted farmhouse with terracotta tiles and shutters that had clearly seen a few Italian summers. The key was exactly where the owner said it would be, which felt like a small miracle given our navigational record. Inside smelled of wood polish and dried lavender, the kind of smell that immediately lowers your blood pressure. I spent a good five minutes just standing in the kitchen, slightly overwhelmed by the view from the window: rolling hills, cypress trees, and a sky that seemed to go on forever.

We'd planned to unpack properly, maybe make a cup of tea and recover from the drive. Instead, we wandered. That's the thing about getting lost on arrival - it sets a tone of happy aimlessness that sticks. We found a path behind the villa that wasn't on any map we'd seen, just a worn dirt track between olive groves. It led to a tiny chapel, barely more than a stone room with a rusted bell, where someone had left fresh flowers in a jar. No sign, no opening hours, no coach parties. Just a quiet spot that existed because it always had.

The village itself revealed itself in pieces. A bakery we'd have missed entirely if I hadn't been hunting for a public toilet. A bar where the owner spoke no English and we spoke barely any Italian, but where we communicated perfectly well through gestures and the universal language of excellent coffee. The main piazza, when we finally found it, was so unbothered by tourism that the locals barely glanced up from their newspapers.

That evening, we sat on the villa terrace with bread, cheese, and a bottle of local Sangiovese that cost less than a London pint. I watched the sun drop behind hills I'd never heard of that morning and thought about how rarely I let myself get lost on purpose. The sat-nav failure had forced a kind of attention I don't normally have - noticing the way light fell on stone walls, the particular silence of a place without traffic, the small triumph of finding your own way rather than following blue dots on a screen.

We'd come to Emilia-Romagna for the food and the scenery, the proper planned holiday experience. What we got, thanks to one recalcitrant piece of technology, was something better: the particular joy of stumbling into places that don't know they're destinations. The next morning I didn't even switch the sat-nav on. We got lost again, deliberately this time, and found a market in a village I still can't pronounce, where an old woman sold us pecorino and told us, through elaborate mime, that her sheep were called Maria and Graziella.

Some holidays you plan. Others, the good ones sometimes, plan you.