I have never been a natural navigator, which is how I ended up standing in a vineyard outside Valenza Monferrato with a suitcase wheel that had chosen this exact moment to detach itself from the rest of my luggage. The sat nav had given up on me somewhere near Alessandria, and my phone map had decided that Piedmont was essentially one big blank space with a small blue dot wandering through it. I had been aiming for the front door of the villa. I had found a field of Nebbiolo grapes and a very confused dog.

The villa itself, when I finally limped up to it with my one-wheeled suitcase scraping a sad rhythm on the gravel, was one of those creamy stone buildings that looks like it has been waiting for you to arrive for about three hundred years. Terracotta roof, green shutters, that particular dusty gold light that only seems to exist in this corner of Italy. I stood there for a moment, sweating through my travelling shirt, and felt the peculiar mix of triumph and exhaustion that comes from getting somewhere entirely by accident.

The key was under a flowerpot, because of course it was. I let myself into a kitchen that smelled of dried herbs and old wood, and that was when I made my decision. I would not plan anything. I would not research. I would get lost on purpose and see what found me.

The next morning I walked out with no map and no destination, just the vague idea of heading downhill because gravity seemed easier than ambition. Within ten minutes I was properly lost. A lane I thought would lead to a road instead led to a crumbling chapel with a door that creaked like a bad horror film. Inside, someone had left fresh wildflowers in a jar. No sign, no information board, just a stone Madonna and the silence of a place that had been prayed in for centuries without anyone making a fuss about it.

I kept walking. A path through hazelnut trees, the kind that produce those famous Piedmont nuts, opened onto a view of the Monferrato hills rolling away like something from a Renaissance painting. I sat on a wall and ate bread and cheese I had stuffed in my pocket, feeling ridiculously pleased with myself. A farmer passed on a scooter, raised his hand without slowing, and disappeared around a bend. That was the only human contact I had for two hours.

The afternoon brought me to a village I still cannot name. It had a single bar, a man drinking espresso who looked like he had been sitting there since approximately 1987, and a notice board advertising a festa that had happened three weeks ago. I ordered a glass of local Barbera, which cost less than a packet of crisps back home, and tried to explain in broken Italian that I was lost. The barman nodded as if this were the most normal thing anyone had ever told him. He pointed me toward a path that he said led to a lake, though his gesture covered about ninety degrees of possibility.

I found the lake, or something lake-ish, at sunset. More of a pond, really, surrounded by reeds and watched over by a heron that clearly considered me an intruder. I sat on a fallen tree until the mosquitoes found me, then walked back through the darkening hills using the lights of distant farmhouses as my only guide.

That night I cooked badly in the villa kitchen, using ingredients I had bought from a shop I stumbled across when a shortcut went wrong. The wine was excellent. The pasta was overcooked. I did not care.

I spent five days like this. Wandering, failing to find things, finding other things instead. A bakery in what I think was Lu that made grissini so perfect they shattered like glass. A vineyard where an old woman showed me her cellar and I understood perhaps one word in ten but nodded enthusiastically throughout. A viewpoint I reached by following a goat path that I would never be able to find again if my life depended on it.

The last morning, I tried to leave early and got lost one final time trying to find the main road. I passed the same vineyard where my wheel had fallen off. The dog was there again. It did not recognise me. I decided to take this personally for about thirty seconds, then laughed and drove away, still not entirely sure which direction I was heading.

Some holidays you plan. Some holidays plan you. This one was the second sort, and I would not have had it any other way.