I have never been a natural navigator, and Puglia decided to remind me of this roughly forty-five minutes after leaving Brindisi airport. The hire car satnav had the confidence of a man who has never once admitted to being lost, which I now realise should have been my first warning. One wrong roundabout later, I was bouncing down a track that grew narrower with every metre, olive branches scraping both wing mirrors like nature's own car wash. I reversed for what felt like a kilometre, sweating profusely, only to discover I had missed the proper turning by a good two hundred yards. A local on a scooter passed me three times during this performance, each glance more amused than the last. By the time I found the actual entrance to the property, I was ready to abandon the vehicle and walk.

The house revealed itself slowly, which felt rather fitting given my approach. A heavy wooden gate, a gravel crunch, then suddenly this low stone building with walls thick enough to survive whatever history had thrown at them. My first thought was that it looked reassuringly unpretentious, the sort of place that does not need to try very hard. The pool glimmered at the far end of the garden, though I barely glanced at it. What stopped me was the silence, or rather the particular quality of it, broken only by cicadas and something rustling in the dry stone wall that I chose to believe was a lizard.

I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of a man who had earned several drinks, then immediately set out to explore on foot, still convinced I could read a map. This was, in retrospect, a mistake. But what a magnificent mistake it turned out to be.

Within ten minutes I was properly lost among the vineyards, the kind of lost where you keep telling yourself the road must be just over the next rise. It never was. What I found instead was a tiny chapel, barely larger than a garden shed, with a rusted iron door and frescoes inside that someone had clearly loved enough to maintain. There was no sign, no information board, nothing to suggest anyone had intended me to find it. I sat on the step for twenty minutes, feeling like an accidental trespasser who had stumbled into someone else's devotion.

The afternoon became a series of these discoveries. A farm track led to an old man selling wine from his garage, measured out in dusty bottles with handwritten labels. He spoke no English and I speak barely any Italian, yet we conducted an entire transaction through gestures and exaggerated facial expressions. I left with a bottle of Primitivo and the strong suspicion I had paid either far too much or suspiciously little. Another wrong turn delivered me to a crumbling masseria, its courtyard overgrown with wild fennel, where a cat watched me with the territorial suspicion of a creature who had not agreed to this arrangement.

By the time I found my way back, the light had turned that particular honeyed colour that makes everything in Puglia look slightly unreal. I sat by the pool with my accidentally acquired wine and watched the swallows darting overhead, feeling rather pleased with my complete inability to follow directions. The satnav sat silent in the car, presumably plotting its revenge for the morning's abuse.

I had arrived expecting to find Puglia through careful planning and researched recommendations. Instead, it found me through my own incompetence, offering up fragments of itself to someone who had taken the long way round. Some people travel with purpose and precision. I appear to require getting gloriously, repeatedly lost, and I am increasingly convinced this is the better approach.