I have always believed that the best holidays are the ones where you accidentally discover something wonderful, and our recent trip to a little place near Priverno and Terracina in Lazio proved that theory beyond any doubt. Though I should probably start with the journey, and specifically with my decision that I absolutely did not need a sat nav for the final stretch because, and I quote myself here, "I have looked at the map, how hard can it be?"

Famous last words, those.

We had flown into Rome Ciampino, picked up our hire car, and made good time down the A1 motorway. The countryside was already working its magic on me, all rolling green hills and distant glimpses of the sea. Then came my moment of hubris. I turned off onto smaller roads, convinced I knew exactly where our holiday home was. Within twenty minutes I was driving down something that was definitely more of a farm track than a road, with olive branches scraping both sides of the car and my partner giving me that particular look that says "I am being very patient but also you are an idiot."

The funny thing is, that wrong turn led us past a tiny vineyard where an old chap was waving his arms about. I thought he was angry. He was actually trying to flag us down to offer a taste of his wine. We spent forty minutes there, standing in his dusty courtyard, drinking something red and extraordinary that he poured from an unlabelled bottle, communicating through elaborate hand gestures and my terrible school Italian. His name was Enzo, I think. Or possibly Vincenzo. The wine was definitely called something, but I never caught it. We bought two bottles and I have no idea if we paid the right amount because he just kept shrugging and smiling.

By the time we actually found our property, tucked away in that lovely quiet spot between Priverno and Terracina, I was already in the most relaxed mood I had been in months. The place itself was perfect, all terracotta and trailing bougainvillea, with a terrace that looked out towards the Aurunci Mountains. But I am getting ahead of myself, because the getting lost had only just begun.

The next morning we set out for what I had planned as a straightforward walk to "explore the local area." I had not accounted for my complete inability to follow trail markers. Within an hour we were deep in woodland, on a path that seemed to be getting narrower rather than wider, and I was doing my best to pretend this was all part of the plan. Then the trees opened up and we found ourselves looking down on this extraordinary little valley, completely hidden from any road, where someone had built a tiny stone chapel with a rusted bell and a wooden door that creaked like something from a film. There were wildflowers growing through the cracks in the steps, and the silence was so complete you could hear bees moving between the lavender. We sat there for an hour, just breathing it in, and I had one of those moments of gentle self-reflection where you realise that your terrible sense of direction might actually be one of your better qualities.

Later that week we got lost trying to find a beach and stumbled instead on a cove near Terracina where local families were fishing with hand lines and children were jumping from rocks into water so clear it looked unreal. We ate bread and cheese we had bought from a shop in Priverno whose owner had insisted on selecting everything personally, and it was the best lunch of the entire holiday.

By the end of the week I had stopped even trying to plan properly. We found a bakery operating out of someone's garage, producing sfogliatelle that crumbled in your fingers. We discovered a bar where old men played cards every afternoon and the coffee cost one euro and came with a free glass of water and a conversation whether you wanted it or not. We wandered into Priverno's historic centre by accident one evening and found a tiny piazza where someone was practicing violin in an upstairs window, the sound drifting down like something from another century.

I think what I loved most was that sense of Lazio as a place that has not been arranged for visitors, where things simply exist because people have always done them that way. The countryside between Priverno and Terracina feels lived-in rather than looked-at, if that makes sense. There is no performance to it.

On our last day I took a final wrong turn on purpose, just to see what might happen. It led me to a field of sunflowers, all facing the same direction like they were waiting for something, and I stood there for a long time thinking about how close I had come to never seeing any of this, how a functioning sat nav would have kept me on the proper roads, how my partner's patience and my own stubborn refusal to admit defeat had somehow delivered me to all these accidental treasures.

I came home with those two bottles of Enzo-or-Vincenzo's wine, still unlabelled, and a resolution to get gloriously lost far more often.