I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I missed the turning for Montalto Di Castro not once, but three times. There I was, sweating gently in a hire car the size of a biscuit tin, circling the same roundabout near the coast while my other half read directions off a phone with roughly four percent battery remaining. "Left at the olive grove," she said. Every turning seemed to have an olive grove. We were surrounded by thousands of the things, all looking identically unhelpful.

The property, when we finally found it, sat down a dusty track that our sat nav clearly considered a personal insult. I had begun to suspect we were being led to a fictional location, perhaps a front for an elaborate Italian prank show. But then the gates swung open and there it was: a low stone house with terracotta tiles and a garden that looked like it had been arranged by someone with excellent taste and absolutely no hurry whatsoever. Bougainvillea tumbled over walls. A lemon tree stood in the corner like a proud sentry. I stepped out of the car and immediately stood on a rake that had been left propped against the wall, which my other half found so amusing she had to sit down on her suitcase.

We had planned to unpack properly, perhaps make a cup of tea and orient ourselves. Instead, within an hour of arriving, we were wandering down a lane that I am still not convinced was entirely a public right of way. The light was doing that extraordinary thing it does on the Lazio coast in late afternoon, turning everything golden and slightly unreal. We passed a field where someone was keeping chickens that looked frankly aristocratic, all glossy feathers and entitled strutting. A dog barked somewhere in the middle distance, not aggressively, just keeping us informed of its general whereabouts.

The lane petered out into something that could generously be called a path. We should have turned back. We had no water, no map, and I was wearing sandals that I had chosen for their holiday aesthetic rather than their practical grip. But there was a glimpse of water through the trees, and something about being slightly lost makes you stubborn. We pressed on, scratching our legs on brambles and arguing good-naturedly about whether we had heard a cinghiale or just a very large squirrel.

What we found was not on any brochure. A small cove, barely a beach really, just a curve of dark volcanic sand where the water moved with that particular Mediterranean clarity that makes you want to weep slightly. An old man was fishing from the rocks with a pole that looked older than both of us put together. He nodded at us without surprise, as if people stumbled in on him every day, which perhaps they did, or perhaps he simply did not care one way or the other. We sat on a flat rock and watched him for twenty minutes without speaking, the sun lowering itself towards the sea with theatrical slowness.

Getting back took longer than it should have. Darkness fell with the suddenness it manages in southern Europe, and we navigated by the lights of what we hoped was the same village we had left. It was not, entirely, but near enough. We emerged onto a road I did not recognise, followed it past a shuttered gelateria and a bar where three men were watching football with the intensity of people defusing a bomb, and somehow looped back to our lane from entirely the wrong direction.

That evening we ate bread and cheese and tomatoes on the terrace, too tired to attempt cooking properly, too content to care. The rake had been moved, presumably by some unseen hand that knew better than to leave such temptations lying about. I thought about how much of my holidays I normally spend trying to get somewhere specific, to tick something off, to have the experience I have already read about in advance. There was something quietly radical about simply not knowing where you were going, about trusting that a dusty track or an overgrown path might lead somewhere worth finding.

The next morning I woke early and walked out alone, deliberately taking a different turning at every opportunity. I found a tiny chapel with a door that opened when I pushed it, the interior cool and smelling of wax and old stone. I found a vineyard where a woman was pruning vines and shouted something cheerful at me that I did not understand but smiled at anyway. I found a lizard the length of my forearm that regarded me with ancient disdain before disappearing into a wall.

I did not find my way back for nearly two hours. It was absolutely glorious.