I should have known the holiday had truly begun when I confidently strode up to what I was certain was our villa, rucksack bouncing, and tried the key in the lock. Nothing. Tried again. Still nothing. A curtain twitched upstairs, and a very confused Italian nonna peered down at me with the expression of someone who had not ordered a sunburnt Englishman for her Tuesday afternoon. Turns out Villanuova sul Clisi has at least two identical-looking stone gateways, and I had wandered approximately two hundred metres too far along the lane. My wife found this hilarious. I found it less so, particularly after hauling my case back past the same oleander bushes I'd already admired once.

The actual villa, when I finally reached it, felt like discovering a secret I'd accidentally stumbled into rather than properly earned. The sort of place you don't find through meticulous planning but through the glorious incompetence that had just unfolded. A modest terrace with wisteria scrambling over weathered beams, a view down towards Lake Garda that made my earlier humiliation feel almost worthwhile.

We'd arrived with no real itinerary, which suited me after the key fiasco. The next morning, still slightly disorientated from travel and perhaps too much local wine, we set off on what was meant to be a straightforward walk to the lake. Within twenty minutes we'd missed a turning, found ourselves on a gravel track between olive groves, and were thoroughly lost in that particular way that feels alarming for approximately thirty seconds before becoming rather wonderful.

The track led us to a tiny chapel, San Rocco, perched on a hillside with no signpost pointing towards it from any main road. The door stood open, and inside smelled of cold stone and old candle wax. Someone had left fresh flowers in a jar, though we saw no one for the entire hour we lingered there, just sitting on the steps and watching clouds move across the water below. I don't think we'd have found it intentionally. We weren't even certain which municipality we were in.

That set the pattern for the week. Deliberately getting ourselves slightly lost became our morning ritual. We'd drive until a road looked interesting, park where it became too narrow to continue, and wander. A lemon orchard near Padenghe where an elderly man pressed samples of oil into our hands without speaking a word of English. A bakery in a village whose name I never properly caught, where they made tortelli di zucca on Thursdays only, and we happened to be there on a Thursday, and happened to be hungry.

The lake itself we approached indirectly, finding small coves away from the organised beaches where German tourists congregated with their systematic towel arrangements. One afternoon we followed a path through reeds and emerged at a tiny harbour where a man was mending nets in a boat that looked older than him. He nodded at us as if strangers appearing from the vegetation were entirely routine, and we sat on the concrete edge with our feet dangling, watching fish dart in the clear water.

I kept thinking about that wrong doorway, the nonna's puzzled face. The whole holiday felt like that moment extended - turning up where I wasn't expected, finding things I hadn't been looking for. There's a particular satisfaction in accidental discovery that planned tourism cannot replicate. The guidebook in my rucksack remained largely unopened. The most memorable places had no entries to read.

On our final evening, walking back from another directionless wander, we found a bar tucked behind the main piazza in Villanuova, no outdoor seating, just locals watching football and drinking spritz. The barman seemed mildly surprised to see us, served us anyway, and we watched the match without understanding the commentary, perfectly content. I realised I'd stopped trying to navigate properly days ago. Getting lost had become the point.

We left the next morning with vague directions and a bottle of that olive oil from the silent orchard. I still don't know exactly where half the places we found actually were. Perhaps that's precisely as it should be. Some holidays you plan meticulously. Others, you simply turn up at the wrong door and see what happens next.