The sat-nav gave up on us somewhere between Turin and nowhere, which is how I found myself wedged down a single-track lane in Piedmont, arguing with a hire car the size of a small barge and a very unimpressed-looking goat. I'd been aiming for Aramengo, a village so tiny it makes my local petrol station look like a metropolis. The goat, I later learned, belonged to a farmer called Enzo who watched the entire reversing spectacle from his vineyard without offering so much as a wave. Italian hospitality, I thought, starts on its own terms.

Three-point turns in Piedmont are character-building. By the time I reached the property, a handsome stone house with shutters the colour of faded terracotta, I'd already had my holiday. Or so I believed. The key was under a flowerpot, classic stuff, and I let myself into a kitchen that smelled faintly of rosemary and old wood. Someone had left a bottle of local Barbera on the table with a note saying "Welcome, don't drink it all tonight." Challenge accepted, then immediately failed.

Morning brought the real discovery. I'd planned precisely nothing, which turns out to be the only plan worth having in this corner of Italy. Wandering without purpose from Aramengo, I took a path that looked like it led somewhere and found myself instead in a walnut grove owned by a woman called Luisa who was harvesting by hand and insisted I help. My Italian stretches to ordering coffee and apologising; somehow we spent two hours together, her explaining the difference between varieties I couldn't name, me nodding enthusiastically and eating far more than I collected. She sent me home with a bag of nuts and directions to a bakery that doesn't appear on any map.

I never found that bakery. What I found was better. A wrong turn down a farm track delivered me to a tiny chapel, maybe twelve feet square, with a fresco inside that looked genuinely medieval and genuinely neglected. The door hung open. There was no ticket office, no rope barrier, no information panel. Just silence and painted saints staring down at dust motes in afternoon light. I sat on the step for half an hour, slightly overwhelmed by the accidental intimacy of it. You don't get that at the Uffizi.

The getting lost became the point. Each morning I'd set out with a water bottle and the confidence of someone who absolutely would not find their intended destination. A path towards what I thought was Moncucco turned into a truffle wood where a dog called Beppe was working with his owner, a man who communicated entirely through gestures and shared his mid-morning bread and salami without ceremony. The truffles, he indicated, were not for amateurs. The salami, mercifully, was.

Evenings back at the house followed their own rhythm. I'd cook badly with local ingredients, drink something red from a vineyard I'd passed without noticing, and listen to the silence that isn't silence at all but crickets and distant tractors and occasionally church bells from villages I couldn't identify. The sat-nav stayed in the glove box where it belonged.

On my final morning, determined to find one particular viewpoint I'd heard mentioned, I ended up at a cemetery instead. Small, immaculate, with views across misty hills that made the wrongness of my arrival feel completely right. An old man was tending his wife's grave with shears and a watering can. We talked, or rather he talked and I understood perhaps a third, about how she'd loved this view, how he'd walk here daily, how the world keeps turning regardless. I left him to his peace and found my way back eventually, though not directly, because directly is not how this place works.

I never did see that viewpoint. I'm not certain I missed it.