I have never been so relieved to see a stone wall in my life. After six hours of driving from Pisa airport, my partner and I finally spotted the weathered sign for our Gubbio holiday let, only to realise we had driven straight past the turning three times. The sat nav had given up somewhere near Perugia, leaving us to navigate by instinct and a rapidly fraying temper. My instinct, it turns out, is terrible.

The property sat high above a valley, accessible via a track that looked like it had last seen proper maintenance sometime in the 1970s. I was convinced we were trespassing on someone's olive farm until a ginger cat appeared from nowhere and led us the final hundred yards like a furry guide who had seen this exact disaster unfold countless times before. We named him Giuseppe. He was not ours to name, but he did not seem to mind.

The farmhouse itself was everything the photos had promised and nothing like them at all. The stone was warmer in person, the wooden shutters more battered, the whole place breathing with the particular stillness of somewhere that has watched centuries pass without much fuss. I stood in the courtyard with our suitcases still in the boot, suddenly aware that I had packed three pairs of heels for a week in rural Umbria. My partner raised an eyebrow. I raised one back, defiant and ridiculous.

We had planned to unpack properly, perhaps make a cup of tea and rest. Instead, within an hour of arrival, we found ourselves wandering without purpose down a path behind the property that seemed to lead nowhere in particular. This became the pattern of our entire stay. The path became a track, the track became a vague indentation between two fields of sunflowers, and suddenly we were standing before a tiny chapel with a rusted gate and no name. Inside, someone had left fresh wildflowers in a jar. There was no sign explaining who, or why, or when. We sat on the step and ate the bread and pecorino we had grabbed on impulse, feeling like trespassers who had stumbled into someone else's private ritual.

That first accidental discovery set the tone for everything that followed. We stopped consulting maps. We stopped making plans. Each morning we would set out with water and vague intentions, then deliberately take whichever turning looked least promising. A gravel track led us to a family-run vineyard where the owner, a woman in her seventies named Carla, poured us samples of Sagrantino and refused payment because, as she put it, we looked lost enough to need charity. A steep footpath through woodland deposited us at a ruined tower with views across to Assisi, visible only in glimpses between the cypress trees. We never found it again on subsequent walks, though we tried. Some places, it seems, only reveal themselves once.

The mishap of our arrival, that comedy of wrong turns and growing panic, became the gift of the entire holiday. I am not someone who gets lost gracefully. I like schedules and confirmations and knowing where the nearest supermarket closes. Yet something about that first afternoon, standing in borrowed silence before an unnamed chapel with cheese in my hand, shifted something stubborn in me. I began to trust the wrong turns. I began to hope for them.

By our final evening, we had a collection of unplanned moments that felt more precious than any scheduled excursion. The thermal spring we found by following a local's vague gesture. The bakery in a village too small for our guidebook, where the owner remembered our faces by the second visit. The sunset spot we discovered only because I needed the loo and my partner had parked randomly on a ridge.

We left Giuseppe a tin of tuna on the doorstep. He ate it without gratitude, then wandered off toward the olive groves without looking back. I understood completely. Some things are not meant to be kept, only encountered by accident and remembered fondly.