I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock the wrong villa. There we were, after six hours of driving from Pisa, knackered and slightly delirious from too many motorway espressos, standing on the doorstep of a very confused Italian family's home in Trequanda. Turns out our actual place was two doors down, hidden behind an overgrown hedge that looked like it had not been trimmed since the Renaissance. The family were terribly good-natured about it, waving us off with what I suspect was relieved laughter.

The proper villa, when we finally found it, was one of those honey-stoned Tuscan farmhouses that looks like it has been gently dozing in the sun for centuries. Terracotta roof, wooden shutters slightly askew, a wisteria vine doing its best to pull down the pergola. My partner announced it was "rustic charm." I announced I needed a drink. We were both right.

The next morning, determined to explore properly, we ignored every map and just walked. This is how we discovered the abandoned chapel. It sat perhaps half a mile from the village, down a track that started as a path and gradually became two tyre ruts between olive groves. The door hung open, and inside the plaster was peeling in the most artistic fashion imaginable, sunlight streaming through a cracked window onto a stone altar. No signs, no information board, no other visitors. Just us and the swallows nesting in the rafters. We sat on the step and ate pecorino like we had planned it.

Getting properly lost came later that afternoon. We had driven towards what I was certain was Montisi, took a wrong turn at a junction with no signage whatsoever, and ended up on a gravel track that seemed to serve only one purpose: connecting a series of forgotten farmsteads. The kind of places where elderly men in flat caps lean on gates and regard passing cars with the suspicion they absolutely deserve. We waved cheerfully. They did not wave back.

Then the track simply stopped at a vineyard. Not a fancy wine-tasting vineyard with a gift shop and English-speaking staff. A working vineyard, rows of Sangiovese vines climbing a south-facing slope, with a shed that looked like it might contain either agricultural equipment or a body. A woman was pruning. We attempted to apologise in phrasebook Italian. She looked us up and down, then pointed to a footpath we had completely missed, squeezed between two cypress trees. "Per Trequanda," she said, as if people got lost here constantly.

That path became the find of the trip. It wound through woodland, crossed a stream on stepping stones that required actual balancing, and emerged suddenly at a viewpoint I cannot name because it had no name. Just a bench, positioned by someone with excellent taste, looking out over the Crete Senesi. Those famous clay hills rolled away in every direction, striped with cultivation, dotted with cypress sentinels. We had stumbled upon a private cinema showing the best film in Tuscany, and we had the only tickets.

The village of Trequanda itself, when we eventually looped back, revealed its quiet corners only to those willing to wander without purpose. A tiny enoteca down a passage that looked like someone's driveway. A bakery that opened when it felt like it, selling saltless bread that made no sense until you tried it with local olive oil. A cat that led us to a well, which led us to a conversation with a man restoring terracotta tiles by hand, who explained his grandfather's techniques for forty-five minutes while we understood perhaps twelve words.

By the end of the week, our navigation strategy had become deliberate aimlessness. We took the smallest roads, accepted that gravel meant possibility, and stopped assuming that unmarked tracks led nowhere. They always led somewhere. Usually somewhere with a view, or a story, or an old man who would eventually wave back.

I came home with a phone full of photographs I cannot geotag and a conviction that the best thing you can do in Tuscany is surrender your sense of direction entirely. The wrong door, it turns out, was excellent practice.