I have never been so grateful for a wonky satnav in all my life. There we were, crawling up yet another cypress-lined track in our hire car, convinced we had taken a wrong turn somewhere near Arezzo, when the gravel crunched beneath the wheels and a stone farmhouse appeared through the olive trees like something from a daydream. Only it was not our farmhouse. Our Poppi was meant to be another three kilometres ahead, according to the increasingly hysterical voice issuing directions from the dashboard. But the track had narrowed, the phone signal had vanished, and somehow we had fetched up at the wrong end of a valley that did not appear on any map I could find.

The mishap, though, turned out to be the making of the whole trip. The owner of this accidental farmhouse, a chap called Renato who was pruning his vines in a battered straw hat, did not seem remotely surprised to see two bewildered Brits emerging from a dust-covered Fiat. He simply pointed down a footpath I would never have noticed, a thin stripe of worn earth between two fields of sunflowers, and said something in Italian that I later worked out meant basically, your place is that way, but why rush. He pressed a fig into my hand, still warm from the sun, and returned to his pruning.

We followed that footpath. There was no earthly reason to, except that our satnav had given up entirely and Renato had made lingering seem like the only sensible option. The path dipped through a copse of oak trees, crossed a stream where frogs plopped into the water at our approach, and emerged onto a terrace of vines so perfectly arranged they looked almost accidental. An old stone well sat in the corner, covered in moss, with a metal bucket still hooked over its rim. My partner, who had been muttering about calling the hire company, went completely silent. That is always how I know something has worked.

The Poppi itself, when we finally found it twenty minutes later, felt almost like an afterthought to the journey. It was lovely, of course, a proper Tuscan stone cottage with terracotta floors and wooden beams thick enough to swing from, though I did not test this. But what stuck with me was the getting lost, the accidental discovery of that well, the way Renato had not even bothered to look up properly when we interrupted his afternoon. The cottage had a small garden with a barbecue and a view across the valley, and I kept finding myself wandering back down that footpath in the evenings, half-hoping to get lost again.

On our third day, we took the car out with no destination in mind, deliberately ignoring every signpost. We ended up in a village that does not appear to have a name, or at least not one we could pronounce. An old woman was selling pecorino from her kitchen window, passing it down in paper parcels through a wooden shutter. We ate it on a wall beside a church that looked like it had been there since before anyone thought to keep records. The cheese was sharp and grassy and nothing like the vacuum-packed stuff from the supermarket at home.

I have always been dreadful at following instructions, maps, recipes, you name it. My mother used to say I would get lost in my own garden. Tuscany, I realised, is the perfect place for this particular failing. The whole landscape seems designed for people who wander off course, who mistake one stone farmhouse for another, who follow a stranger's pointing finger into the unknown. Every wrong turn delivered something I could not have planned: a family-run vineyard where the daughter spoke broken English and poured us three different Chiantis before lunch, a ruined chapel in a field of wild fennel where lizards basked on the warm stones, a pool of turquoise water in a stream that I would never have found without first being thoroughly, hopelessly misplaced.

By the end of the week, I had stopped charging my phone entirely. The satnav stayed in the glove compartment, sulking. We found a bakery in what I think was Bucine, though I could not swear to it, where the bread came out of a wood-fired oven at half past six each morning and was sold from a counter that looked older than my grandmother. We ate it with tomatoes so ripe they practically fell apart when you looked at them, and olive oil from a farm we stumbled across after taking a left turn that definitely should have been a right.

I am back at my desk now, staring at a screen that tells me exactly where I am at all times, and I keep thinking about that fig in my hand, warm and slightly split, given by a man who never asked our names. The Poppi was comfortable and clean and everything the website had promised, but what I actually came home with was the memory of being gloriously, deliberately lost, and finding that Tuscany rewards the wandering far more than it does the well-directed. I have already deleted the maps app from my phone. Not permanently, perhaps, but it felt like the right gesture. Some places, I have learned, are better reached by accident than by design.