I have never been so relieved to see a goat in all my life. There I was, bumping down what I was fairly certain was a gravel driveway in Loiano, Emilia Romagna, convinced I had taken a wrong turn somewhere near Bologna and was now trespassing on somebody's farm. The sat nav had given up on me three roundabouts ago, and my phone was playing that fun game where it claims to have full signal but refuses to actually load anything useful. Then the goat appeared, standing on a stone wall like a very woolly traffic warden, and beyond it I spotted the terracotta roof of the farmhouse I had booked. I had arrived, more or less by accident, and that pretty much set the tone for the entire week.

The property itself was one of those solid stone buildings that looks like it has been there since before Italy had a proper government, which in fairness it probably had. My host, a woman called Carla who spoke rapid Italian with the occasional English word thrown in like a lifeline, showed me round with the patience of someone who has watched many Britons struggle with keyless entry and outdoor lighting. I immediately fell in love with the covered terrace, where a wobbly wooden table sat under vines that were definitely going to drop something on me at some point. The view rolled out over hills that seemed to go on forever, all misty green and somehow impossibly Italian, like a film set that had been left running.

Carla mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that there was a walking path behind the house that led to "some old things." This turned out to be the understatement of the century. I set off the next morning with no real plan, a bottle of water, and the overconfidence of someone who had not yet learned that Italian walking times are measured differently to British ones. Within twenty minutes I was properly lost, not the alarming kind but the delicious sort where every turn reveals something you were not looking for. I stumbled across a tiny chapel, barely bigger than a garden shed, with a fresco inside that looked genuinely ancient and smelled powerfully of damp stone and incense. There was no sign, no entry fee, no gift shop. Just a wooden door that pushed open with a creak, and silence so complete I could hear my own heartbeat.

Getting lost became my daily ritual. One afternoon I took a wrong turn on what I thought was the road back from the village and ended up in a hamlet so small it did not appear to have a name, just a cluster of houses and an old man sitting outside one of them shelling beans into a bowl. He waved me over without speaking, poured me a glass of something red from an unlabelled bottle, and we sat there for half an hour communicating in gestures and raised eyebrows. I never learned his name. I never saw another person there. It was one of the best afternoons I have spent anywhere.

The village of Loiano itself I discovered almost by accident too, having set out to find a supermarket and taken a scenic route that was definitely not scenic on purpose. It sits on a ridge with views down to the plains, all narrow streets and sudden squares where old men gather to conduct very serious conversations about football. I found a bakery by following my nose down an alleyway that looked like it led nowhere, and emerged with a still-warm ciambella that I ate sitting on a wall, getting sugar absolutely everywhere and not caring in the slightest.

There was a moment, about halfway through the week, when I realised I had stopped trying to plan anything at all. Normally I am the sort of person who researches restaurants, checks opening times, builds itineraries with military precision. Here, that approach had been defeated not by any great philosophical insight but by the simple fact that phone signal was patchy, many places did not seem to have websites, and nobody was in much of a hurry to confirm anything anyway. I had to let go. And in letting go, I found things I would never have found otherwise: the swimming hole in a river where local teenagers gathered on rocks, the vineyard with a handwritten sign offering tastings by appointment, the trattoria that only opened on Thursdays and served one thing, which was whatever the owner felt like cooking.

The mishap of my arrival, that wrong turn down what I thought was a driveway but was actually just a very confident goat's personal territory, turned out to be the best possible introduction. It taught me immediately that this was not a place for precise navigation, for knowing exactly where you were going and how long it would take to get there. It was a place for wandering, for accepting that the wrong path might be the right one, for trusting that there would be something worth finding even if you had no idea what you were looking for.

On my last morning I tried to find that chapel again, the tiny one with the damp fresco, and I failed completely. I walked for an hour, took what I was sure was the same path, and ended up somewhere else entirely, at a viewpoint I had not seen before, watching mist lift off hills that looked different in the early light. I laughed out loud, there on my own, at the sheer glorious impossibility of trying to control any of this. Then I turned round and walked back to the farmhouse by yet another route, arriving just in time for Carla to bring me coffee and ask, with a knowing smile, if I had been lost again. I told her yes, absolutely, and that I would not have had it any other way.