I have never been particularly gifted at reading maps, which is how I found myself reversing down a single-track lane in Marche with a hire car the size of a small boat and a local farmer waving his arms at me like I was attempting to land a plane. The sat nav had given up three miles back, defeated by a road that appeared to exist only in theory. My destination was a converted farmhouse near Servigliano, and I was already forty minutes late, slightly sweaty, and questioning every life choice that had led me to believe rural Italy was where I belonged.

The property, when I finally found it, sat at the end of a gravel track bordered by wild fennel and overgrown lavender. I had expected something charming; what I got was a stone building that looked like it had been patiently waiting for someone to notice it since the eighteenth century. The owner, a woman called Luisa with hands that suggested she spent her mornings in olive groves and her afternoons making decisions, handed me a key and pointed vaguely towards the hills. "You will get lost," she said, not unkindly. "Everyone does. It is the best way."

I took her at her word the following morning, setting off with a water bottle and the confidence of a person who had once successfully navigated IKEA without an argument. Within twenty minutes I was lost. Properly, completely lost, in a landscape of rolling hills and sudden valleys where every road looked like a driveway and every driveway looked like a road. I found myself in a hamlet that did not appear on any map I had seen, where an elderly man was repairing a bicycle outside a house with geraniums spilling from every windowsill. He did not speak English. I do not speak Italian beyond restaurant necessities. We established, through gestures and some enthusiastic pointing, that I was looking for nowhere in particular, which seemed to delight him.

He led me, walking his bicycle, to a path that descended through woodland to a stream I would never have found deliberately. The water ran clear over stones that looked like they had been polished for centuries. I sat on a fallen tree and ate the bread and pecorino I had packed, feeling like I had stumbled into someone else's secret. That became the pattern of the week. I would set out with vague intentions, take a turn that looked interesting, and find myself somewhere I had no business being.

There was the ruined chapel on a ridge, its door hanging open, its interior painted with frescoes so faded you could only catch them in certain light. There was the vineyard where a family pressing grapes by hand insisted I try three varieties and sent me away with a bottle I had not paid for. There was the afternoon I followed a track that became a path that became nothing, ending at a farmhouse where a woman was making pasta on a table in her garden. She showed me how she rolled it, paper-thin, and I stood there like a student at a masterclass, aware of my own uselessness in the face of such competence.

Each evening I returned to the farmhouse with dusty shoes and stories that would not impress anyone who valued efficiency. The pool, when I used it, was cold enough to remind me I was alive. The evenings were warm enough to sit outside with wine and the particular silence of a place where nobody was rushing anywhere.

I began to understand what Luisa had meant. Getting lost was not an inconvenience here; it was the point. The Marche I found by accident was nothing like the one I had researched. No guidebook had mentioned that stream, that chapel, that pasta lesson in a stranger's garden. The mishap of my arrival, the wrong turn that had made a farmer wave his arms at me, was simply the first of many. I stopped checking my phone for directions. I started taking roads because they looked like they went somewhere interesting, which they usually did, though rarely where I expected.

On my final morning I walked to a village I had discovered two days earlier, one that consisted of perhaps twelve houses and a bar where the coffee cost one euro and the owner remembered my name. I sat with my espresso and thought about how carefully I had planned this holiday, how little of that planning had mattered, and how relieved I felt about that. Some places reward intention. Marche, I think, rewards the people who are willing to look foolish, to reverse down lanes, to admit they have no idea where they are going and see what finds them instead.

I drove back to the airport with the sat nav still sulking in the glove compartment, navigating by memory and occasional guesswork. I got lost twice more. I did not mind at all.