I will never forget the moment I realised my sat-nav had given up on me entirely. There I was, winding up yet another hill outside Cingoli, convinced I was following the road to our holiday let, when the gravel simply stopped at a farmer's gate and a very unimpressed sheep stared me down. I had to reverse half a mile of dusty track, sweating profusely, while my partner helpfully read aloud every contradictory instruction the device offered. "In fifty metres, turn left," it chirped, as we faced a solid wall of cypress trees. Technology, I have learned, has its limits in Le Marche.

We found the proper road eventually, if you can call it that. A narrow strip of pale stone curling through farmland, bordered by sunflowers that had gone slightly floppy in the August heat. The kind of road that makes you grip the steering wheel and mutter apologies to the hire car. But then we crested a rise and there it was, our base for the week, tucked among olive groves with a view that genuinely made me laugh out loud. Not polite appreciation, but actual surprised laughter. Rolling hills folded into each other all the way to a distant shimmer of sea, and not a single other building in sight. My navigation disaster was already forgiven.

The owners had left the key under a terracotta pot, classic rural Italy, with a handwritten note about the boiler and a bottle of local Verdicchio chilling in the fridge. I poured a glass immediately, still dusty from the road, and stood on the terrace watching swallows dart about. The villa itself was simple and solid, thick walls that promised cool interiors, a kitchen that smelled faintly of rosemary from the previous guests. Nothing glossy or staged, which suited us perfectly. We had not come for marble bathrooms.

That first evening, we walked without purpose, which is not like us. Usually I am the person with the itinerary, the highlighted map, the restaurant booked three weeks ahead. But something about getting so thoroughly lost on arrival had shaken my confidence, or perhaps freed me. We followed a path that seemed to lead nowhere in particular, past a ruined stone wall where wild fennel grew waist-high, its aniseed smell rising with every brush of our legs. The light was that particular honeyed colour that comes before proper sunset, and we kept walking simply because turning back felt like admitting defeat.

We stumbled upon a tiny chapel, barely more than a shed with a rusted cross, its door wedged open with a stone. Inside, someone had left fresh flowers in a jam jar and a candle burned in a chipped saucer. No sign, no opening hours, no gift shop. Just a place that existed because someone local still cared enough to tend it. We sat on the step and watched the sky turn proper orange, sharing the bread and pecorino we had grabbed from the kitchen. It was not a planned picnic. It was not an Instagram moment. It was simply what happened when we stopped trying to get somewhere.

The next morning, determined to recreate this accidental magic, we set out deliberately without the map. This is harder than it sounds. The urge to check a phone, to verify, to know, is almost physical. But we resisted, choosing instead to follow the sound of a dog barking, then a stream, then nothing at all. We found a village that does not appear in our guidebook, thirteen houses and a bar where an old man made us coffee without asking what we wanted. He simply decided. Through gestures and my terrible Italian, we learned the village had eighty people in winter, perhaps two hundred when the children came back for August. He showed us a photograph of himself younger, holding a massive porcini mushroom, and we admired it with the enthusiasm it deserved.

By day three, getting lost had become our methodology. We drove down roads that grew progressively narrower until we had to fold in the wing mirrors and hold our breath past overhanging branches. We found a lake, apparently man-made for irrigation, where locals swam in the early morning and left by noon. We joined them once, floating in water that smelled faintly of earth, watching herons stand motionless on the far bank. No lifeguard, no entry fee, no facilities beyond a rough wooden bench. Just water and heat and the occasional dragonfly.

The mishap that started it all, that sheep-judged dead end, became our running joke. Every time we faced a choice of direction, one of us would suggest "the sheep option" with theatrical dread. But the truth is, those wrong turns gave us the week. The planned excursions, the recommended viewpoints, the places we had read about in advance, all blurred together in comfortable pleasantness. It was the unplanned discoveries that stuck, the chapel and the coffee and the swimming lake, the sense of being somewhere not because a list told us to, but because we had wandered in by accident and been welcomed.

On our final evening, we tried to find that chapel again and failed completely. The path looked different, or we had approached from another angle, or memory had softened the details. We walked for an hour, increasingly unsure, until we emerged at a viewpoint we did not recognise, equally beautiful, equally empty. My partner laughed and suggested the chapel had never existed, a mirage of fennel and sunset. I prefer to think we simply had not earned it twice. Some places, perhaps, are rewards for specific moments of surrender, not destinations to be revisited.

We left the next morning with bread from a bakery we found only because a road was closed, with wine from a vineyard whose sign we spotted while turning around in someone's driveway. My sat-nav sat ignored in the glove compartment, sulking perhaps, or simply irrelevant now. I had learned what Le Marche seemed determined to teach me, that the best experiences come from not knowing where you are going, from trusting the wrong turn, from accepting that a sheep in your headlights might be the start of something rather than an obstacle to it.

I still plan my holidays, of course. I am not entirely reformed. But now I build in space for accident, for the unplanned hour, for the road that does not appear on any map I can find. And sometimes, when I close my eyes, I am back on that dusty track, reversing in confusion, with no idea that I am already exactly where I need to be.