I have never been so relieved to see a donkey in my life.

We had been winding through the hills of northern Marche for the better part of an hour, my partner navigating while I clutched a rapidly dying phone and a printed map that turned out to be for entirely the wrong Apecchio. The sat nav had given up somewhere near Cagli, declaring in a huff that our destination did not exist. I had insisted we did not need to charge the phone before leaving Ancona. I was, predictably, wrong.

The donkey in question stood in a field just past a bend that looked identical to the previous seventeen bends. Beside it, barely visible behind an olive grove, sat a stone farmhouse with a faded NOVASOL sign swinging from a rusted bracket. We had found our holiday let by pure accident, having missed the proper turning three miles back and stumbled upon a local farmer who communicated directions entirely through gestures and the word "sempre dritto" repeated with increasing volume.

The property itself was one of those gloriously unhurried Italian affairs. Thick walls that smelled of cool stone and old wood smoke. A kitchen with a fireplace you could practically stand inside, and a back door that opened onto a terrace where lizards darted between terracotta pots of lavender. My partner immediately claimed the hammock. I immediately discovered that the coffee maker required a level of engineering patience I do not possess before breakfast.

What struck me first was the silence. Not empty silence, but the busy kind. Cicadas, distant sheep bells, someone pruning vines a field away. We had planned day trips to Urbino, perhaps a drive to the Furlo Gorge. Instead, within an hour of arrival, I found myself wandering down a track behind the house that I assumed was a path but was probably just a drainage channel. It led to a ruined chapel half-swallowed by brambles, its doorway framed by wild roses. No sign, no information board, no other visitors. Just a stone bench where someone long ago had sat to look at the same valley I was looking at now.

That became the pattern of the week. Getting lost on purpose, or by accident, and finding things that felt like secrets.

There was the bakery in Apecchio village that we only found because I took a wrong turn trying to find a supermarket. No name above the door, just a handwritten sign saying "pane" and an old woman who sold us warm ciambelle and told us about the flood of 1946 while her grandson pretended not to understand my Italian. There was the swimming hole in the Candigliano river, discovered when we followed a local's vague gesture down an unmarked track, where we spent an afternoon watching dragonflies and failing to catch fish with our hands.

I am not someone who normally embraces being lost. I like a plan. I like knowing where the nearest cashpoint is. But something about those hills, about the way the roads loop back on themselves and the signage seems more suggestive than definitive, wore down my need for certainty. By day three, I was actively choosing the smaller track, the unmarked turning, the route that looked like it led nowhere.

One evening, thoroughly lost on what I maintain was a bridle path but was probably someone's driveway, we stumbled upon a tiny vineyard with a shed that doubled as a tasting room. The owner, a man called Franco with eyebrows like hedgerows, poured us vernaccia and told us about the local truffle hunters and their dogs. We bought two bottles and drank one that night on the terrace, watching bats emerge from the eaves and feeling terribly pleased with ourselves for having no idea where we were.

The mishap with the phone and the wrong map had started the holiday with mild panic and a small argument about whose responsibility navigation was. But it set the tone for something I had not expected. In a landscape that refuses to be rushed, where roads narrow without warning and the best places have no coordinates, getting lost stops being a problem and becomes the whole point.

I still do not know the proper name of that ruined chapel. I could not find the bakery again if you paid me. But I remember exactly how the light fell through the broken roof, and the precise taste of those warm doughnuts, and the particular quality of silence that follows when you stop trying to get somewhere and simply let yourself be where you are.