We'd been driving for what felt like eleven hours but was probably closer to three when I realised I'd been confidently navigating us towards Fabro using a postcode that belonged to a petrol station near Perugia. My partner, who had been suspiciously quiet for the last twenty minutes, finally asked why the sat nav kept insisting we were three miles from our destination while surrounded by nothing but sunflower fields and a very judgmental-looking goat.

The truth came out at a bar in a village I still cannot name, where an elderly gentleman with one spectacular eyebrow drew us a map on a paper napkin. This map featured landmarks such as "the bend where my cousin crashed his Vespa in 1987" and "a tree that looks like Mussolini if you squint." We treasured it more than our passports.

The fattoria itself materialised down a gravel track that our hire car treated with the enthusiasm of a cat approaching a bath. But stepping out into that courtyard, with its weathered stone walls and the sort of silence that makes you aware you've been talking too loudly your entire life, something shifted. The mishap didn't matter. The eyebrow man's tree didn't matter. We'd arrived somewhere properly hidden.

What followed wasn't sightseeing in any organised sense. It was glorious, accidental discovery. One morning we took a wrong turn seeking bread and found ourselves in a hamlet called something like San Something-or-Other, where a woman was selling pecorino from her kitchen window. She spoke no English, we spoke Italian that peaked at "due cappuccini," and yet twenty minutes later we were carrying away cheese wrapped in newspaper and a jar of honey from her neighbour's bees. Payment involved a lot of gesturing and mutual delight.

The getting lost became the point. We found a tiny chapel with frescoes fading like old photographs, its door permanently unlocked, its visitor book containing entries from three years prior. We stumbled upon a spring where locals filled enormous bottles, the water so cold it made your teeth ache. A man there explained, mostly through mime, that his grandfather had washed there every morning of his life. I believed him absolutely.

There's something particular about Umbrian countryside that encourages this wandering. The hills roll and fold in ways that hide valleys until you're suddenly inside them. Roads that appear to lead nowhere arrive at farmsteads where dogs sleep in the shade and someone is always growing something magnificent. We developed a habit of simply stopping when something looked interesting, which is how we spent an hour watching an elderly couple harvest olives, eventually being waved over to taste the oil practically still warm from pressing.

My gentle self-reflection came one evening, walking back to the fattoria after a wrong turn had added an hour to what should have been a brief stroll. The light was doing that golden thing it does before sunset, and I found myself laughing aloud at how thoroughly I'd abandoned my usual need for efficiency, for checking items off lists, for knowing exactly where I was going. The person who'd panicked at the petrol station postcode felt like someone I'd invented to worry on my behalf.

That evening we sat by the pool with wine from a vineyard we'd discovered purely because its sign was misspelled and therefore charming. Bats emerged. Somewhere, that goat was probably still judging someone. I thought about how the best moments of this holiday had come entirely from failure, from misdirection, from trusting that interesting things happen when you stop insisting on knowing where you are.

We never did find the tree that looked like Mussolini. I'm certain it would have disappointed anyway.