I have never been very good at reading maps, which is a generous way of saying I am absolutely terrible at it. So when my partner handed me the directions to our Capo di Ponte holiday let in Lombardy and said "you navigate," I should have recognised it as a test of our relationship rather than a simple request.

We had flown into Milan Bergamo, hired a Fiat so small my knees were practically tucked under my chin, and set off north towards the Val Camonica. The plan was straightforward. The execution, less so. Somewhere around Brescia I became convinced that the sat nav was "taking the scenic route" and overruled it. This is how we ended up on a single-track road that climbed steadily through chestnut woods, my partner gripping the door handle while I maintained a fixed grin and pretended this was all part of the adventure.

The mishap came at a tight bend where the road simply stopped being a road. A farmer in a battered Ape three-wheeler waved us down, and through elaborate hand gestures and my regrettably limited Italian, conveyed that we had driven up someone's private track to their walnut orchard. I performed a seventeen-point turn while he watched with the patient amusement of a man who has seen this many times before. My partner photographed the whole thing. "For posterity," she said, though I suspect the real audience was WhatsApp.

Properly routed at last, we found the Capo di Ponte property perched above the River Oglio, a solid stone house with a terrace that looked directly across to the rock engravings of the UNESCO heritage site. I had researched none of this. The engravings were a complete surprise, discovered only because I went out that first morning to figure out where exactly we were, still slightly disoriented from walnut-gate.

I wandered down a path behind the house, thinking it might lead to a village shop, and found myself in a narrow valley where sandstone boulders carried images of deer, warriors, and strange symbolic figures carved thousands of years ago. There were perhaps half a dozen other visitors across the entire site. I sat on a warm rock and watched a lizard dart between engravings of hunters and spirals, feeling the particular pleasure of stumbling upon something extraordinary without having planned a moment of it.

That set the pattern for the week. We abandoned most of our plans. A wrong turn seeking a recommended trattoria led us instead to a tiny hamlet called Nadro, where a woman selling honey from her garage insisted we try her walnut liqueur and pointed us to a footpath through abandoned terraces where wild asparagus grew thick among the dry stone walls. We ate it that evening with eggs from a neighbour's chickens, cooked on the property's ancient gas hob that required matches and prayer.

Another afternoon, trying to find a swimming spot marked on a tourist leaflet, we took a track too far and discovered a shallow pool beneath a Roman-era bridge where local teenagers were already splashing about. They regarded us with the suspicion due to obvious tourists, then graciously allowed us to share their secret. The water was cold enough to steal your breath for three full seconds before your body adjusted.

By the end of the week I had developed what I can only describe as faith in getting lost. Each morning we would set out with vague intentions and deliberately vague directions. The valley rewarded this approach constantly. We found a bakery in a village not listed in any guidebook, where the owner spoke only Camunian dialect and communicated prices by holding up fingers. We found a vineyard offering tastings from a shed, the winemaker shrugging when we asked about opening hours. "When I am here," he said, which turned out to be most afternoons if the weather held.

On our final evening we sat on that terrace with glasses of something local and red, watching the light change on the mountains. My partner asked if I had enjoyed the holiday despite the navigation disasters. I admitted that the disasters were precisely what I had enjoyed most. There is a particular quality to places you find by accident, a sense of having earned them through your own incompetence rather than through diligent research and timely arrival.

The Capo di Ponte property itself had become part of this feeling. I could not now separate the house from the unexpected engravings, the walnut liqueur, the cold pool under the Roman bridge. It existed for me as the centre of a web of accidental discoveries, each one slightly ridiculous in its origin, each one now precious in memory.

We packed the tiny Fiat in silence the next morning, both of us slightly melancholy. I checked my phone and saw that my partner had finally posted her walnut-gate photographs. The caption read simply: "Never let him navigate." I could not argue. Some skills are worth admitting you do not possess, particularly when their absence leads you somewhere you never knew you needed to go.