I should have known the sat-nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's vegetable patch. There I was, winding up through the Ligurian hills, absolutely convinced I was about to become a local legend - the English bloke who drove his hire car into an olive grove. The road narrowed to little more than a donkey track, and I found myself holding my breath, squeezing past stone walls that had probably stood since before my great-grandfather was born. Classic me, really. I always say I'll embrace the adventure, then spend half the journey praying I don't scrape the paintwork.

But here's the thing about getting properly lost in Liguria - it rewards the stubborn. I abandoned the car in what I hoped was a legitimate parking spot, more of a widening in the lane really, and set off on foot with my rucksack and a rapidly deflating sense of confidence. Ten minutes of wandering later, I stumbled into a tiny hamlet that didn't appear on any map I could find. An elderly gent was tending tomatoes in his garden, and with my appalling Italian and his patient gestures, he pointed me toward a path that supposedly led to Magliolo. I never did learn the name of that village. It remains one of those happy mysteries travel sometimes throws your way.

The path climbed through chestnut woods, and I began to understand why people fall so hard for this corner of Italy. The light filters through the leaves in that particular way that makes everything look slightly golden, slightly unreal. I passed a ruined stone cottage with fig trees growing through what had once been its roof, the fruit just beginning to ripen. No sign, no fence, no indication anyone had claimed it in decades. I picked one, ate it standing there in the shade, and felt genuinely criminal in the most wonderful sense.

Magliolo itself appeared almost accidentally, tucked into a fold of hillside I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been deliberately not looking where I was going. The property, when I finally found it, sat at the end of a gravel track that my sat-nav would have had an absolute breakdown over. A woman from the village had left the key where she'd promised, under a terracotta pot beside a lavender bush humming with bees.

That first evening, still slightly disorientated from my unplanned expedition, I walked out with no destination in mind and discovered a track leading down toward a stream I could hear but not see. The undergrowth closed in, brambles catching at my sleeves, and I nearly turned back half a dozen times. Then suddenly the trees opened up onto a small clearing where someone had long ago built a stone basin for washing clothes. Water still trickled through it, ice-cold and perfectly clear. I sat on the warm stone until the light faded completely, feeling rather pleased with my talent for aimlessness.

I thought about all the holidays where I'd rushed between recommended sights, checking experiences off some mental list I'd never actually written down. There's something humbling about realising your best moment came from a wrong turn and a stubborn refusal to admit defeat to technology. The sat-nav never did recover its dignity, by the way. I switched it off entirely after that first day and never missed it once.