I have never been a natural navigator. My phone insists I have an excellent sense of direction, but my phone also thinks I enjoy receiving emails at half past midnight, so we clearly disagree on what constitutes a virtue. This particular failing became rather central to my recent trip to Torri in Sabina, a tiny medieval hamlet in the Lazio countryside where I had booked a stone farmhouse through Novasol, mostly because the photographs showed a terrace with vines and what looked like the sort of silence you could actually hear.

The journey from Rome Fiumicino had started well enough. I collected my hire car, a Fiat 500 that felt approximately the size of a generous handbag, and set off north on the A1. The sat nav spoke with the calm authority of someone who had never once taken a wrong turn in their entire digital life. I, meanwhile, missed my exit because I was distracted by a field of sunflowers that had arranged themselves with what I can only describe as aggressive photogenicity. By the time I realised, I was somewhere near Orte, which is not, cartographically speaking, where I needed to be.

The funny mishap came twenty minutes later, on a white road that grew progressively narrower until it resembled a goat path with pretensions. I encountered a tractor. The farmer, a man whose face suggested he had seen many Fiat 500s in distress, indicated that I should reverse. For two hundred metres. Uphill. Around a bend. With a dry stone wall on one side and a rather steep appreciation of the Sabine Hills on the other. I performed this manoeuvre with the grace of a shopping trolley in a gale, accompanied by much apologetic waving and a small collision with a bush that the farmer found genuinely amusing. He directed me back to the proper road with gestures that implied this happened roughly twice daily.

I arrived at Torri in Sabina as the afternoon was softening into evening. The hamlet itself clings to a hillside with the tenacity of something that has known earthquakes, invasions, and the passage of centuries. My farmhouse sat at the edge, its stone walls warm from the sun, with those promised vines draping a pergola that creaked pleasantly in what I now understood to be the local breeze. The owner, a woman called Luisa who spoke English in the manner of someone who had learned it from elderly films, handed me keys and a bottle of her own olive oil with the casual generosity that still surprises me about rural Italy.

I had intended to unpack properly. Instead I wandered, still slightly adrenalised from the tractor incident, through lanes that seemed to arrange themselves according to medieval logic rather than any modern grid. This is how I found the first hidden thing: a small chapel, barely more than a room, its door unlatched, containing a fresco of the Madonna that someone had painted with extraordinary delicacy probably six hundred years ago. There was no sign, no entry fee, no audio guide. Just dust motes and the faint smell of wax from a candle that someone, recently, had lit.

The following days I made a project of deliberate disorientation. I drove without destination, took turns that looked unpromising, followed a stream until the road simply stopped at a farmhouse where an old woman sold me pecorino cheese and told me about the wild boar that passed through her olives at dawn. I found a trattoria in a village I cannot confidently name, where the proprietor produced hand-rolled pasta with a rabbit ragu and refused my credit card with the cheerful absolutism of someone operating in a different economic century. I ate there twice more, becoming briefly famous as the English person who kept returning, which I suspect says something about their usual clientele.

There was a morning I became properly lost, the sort where your phone displays a blank grey square and the landmarks start repeating with unsettling similarity. I stopped by a cypress-shaded track and simply sat on a wall, eating bread and tomatoes I had bought from a van that morning. A man on a scooter paused, not to help, merely to observe. We nodded at each other. He continued. I realised I was not anxious, which surprised me. The Sabina hills rolled away in every direction, green and gold, scattered with the dark punctuation of olive groves. Somewhere a dog barked with the lazy intermittence of warm weather. I found my way back eventually, by following the smell of woodsmoke and the sound of church bells, which is probably how people managed for most of human history.

On my final evening I sat on that farmhouse terrace with Luisa's olive oil and some local wine, watching the swallows perform their complicated evening manoeuvres. I thought about how much I had not seen, the guidebook attractions I had ignored, the checklists uncompleted. The mishap with the tractor now seemed like the proper beginning, a small humiliation that had opened something up. I am not converted to intentional disorganisation. I will still plan, still research, still arrive at airports with unnecessary punctuality. But I am grateful for the particular education of those days, the way getting lost in a landscape that does not hurry itself can teach you something about your own capacity for stillness.

I left the next morning with cheese in my luggage and a determination to miss at least one exit on every future journey. Some things, I have learned, find you only when you are not looking for them.