Getting to our trullo in Ostuni involved a hire car, a sat nav with a questionable grasp of Italian pronunciation, and me confidently ignoring both. My partner had warned me about the narrow lanes around the Valle d'Itria. I nodded along, then promptly took a wrong turn into what I insisted was a shortcut. It was someone's olive grove. A very nice someone, as it turned out, who waved us back toward civilisation with the weary patience of a person who has redirected many lost tourists in their time.

We found the property down a dusty track that looked increasingly like a dead end. The white stone walls appeared suddenly, almost apologetically, between ancient olive trees that had probably witnessed centuries of equally confused arrivals. I was still muttering about the sat nav when we stepped inside and I promptly forgot to complain about anything. The conical roof, the thick walls, the cool darkness after the blinding Puglian sun - it felt like walking into a story I'd half-remembered from childhood.

The next morning we set out with no particular plan, which is when the real discoveries began. Ostuni's old town, the White City, sits perched on its hill looking impossibly photogenic. We wandered up through the centro storico, took the obvious photographs, then made the excellent decision to get properly lost. Down a flight of steps that looked like they led nowhere, we found a tiny bakery where an elderly woman was selling focaccia still warm from the oven. She spoke no English. We spoke barely any Italian. The transaction involved a lot of pointing and smiling and what I now realise was probably me accidentally complimenting her nephew rather than the bread.

Wandering further, we stumbled into a courtyard where a man was repairing fishing nets with the methodical patience of someone who has never owned a smartphone. He looked up, nodded, returned to his work. We stood there like idiots, watching, until his wife appeared with coffee and somehow we were sitting down, drinking something strong and bitter, understanding almost nothing and feeling completely at home.

The following days became a pattern of deliberate aimlessness. We found a beach south of the town, not the organised lidos with their neat rows of umbrellas, but a scruffier stretch where locals parked their cars among the dunes and waded straight into water so clear it felt like a trick. Another wrong turn led us to a masseria, one of the fortified farmhouses scattered across the countryside, where they were selling cheese made from their own herd. I bought far more than we could reasonably eat and spent the rest of the week constructing elaborate meals around increasingly desperate attempts to finish it all.

There was the afternoon we followed a sign to an archaeological site that the guidebooks barely mention, Roman ruins half-reclaimed by wildflowers and neglect. We were the only visitors. A lizard watched us from a fallen column with the superiority of something that had never paid an entrance fee in its life.

I kept thinking about that wrong turn into the olive grove. My natural instinct is to plan, to optimise, to arrive efficiently. The holiday taught me nothing I didn't already know but somehow needed to relearn: that the best experiences come from competence abandoned, from the willingness to look foolish, from trusting that interesting things happen when you stop trying so hard to find them.

On our final evening we walked back to that same bakery, hoping to thank the woman with the focaccia. It was closed, naturally. We never learned her name. But we found a bar nearby, down another unmarked alley, where they served wine from a local vineyard I'd never heard of and probably couldn't pronounce. We sat outside as the white walls of the old town turned golden, then pink, then grey.

I still maintain that shortcut would have worked if the olive grove had been slightly more accommodating.