The sat-nav gave up on us somewhere between Perugia and complete bewilderment, which is how I found myself wedged down a gravel track, arguing with a goat about right of way. The goat won. I reversed fifty metres past an olive grove that looked older than my grandmother, finally spotting the stone archway that marked our Magione. The whole thing felt less like arriving at a holiday let and more like stumbling into a slightly crumbly Renaissance painting.

A Magione, for the uninitiated, is essentially a fortified farmhouse with delusions of grandeur, and ours had clearly spent the last five centuries perfecting the art of looking dramatically weathered. Thick walls the colour of burnt honey. Shutters that squeaked with theatrical timing. A swimming pool tucked into the hillside like a secret someone had forgotten to keep. My partner immediately declared it "authentically rustic." I translated this as "the hot water might be optimistic."

We had not planned to get lost. We had planned to be organised, efficient, perhaps even slightly smug about our seamless arrival. Instead, the sat-nav's abandonment forced us down lanes that narrowed to suggestions rather than roads, past farmsteads where dogs slept in the exact centre of the tarmac and regarded our approach with profound indifference. Somewhere near Lake Trasimeno's western edge, we took a wrong turn that became a right turn that became, eventually, the best thing that happened all week.

The goat incident occurred near a village that I still cannot name because I never found it again. A tiny piazza, a bar with three tables, an old man drinking something amber who gestured us toward a cantina selling wine from plastic jugs. We bought two litres for seven euros and felt like criminals. The wine tasted of cherries and poor decisions and was absolutely magnificent.

Our Magione sat perched above this accidental world, close enough to Lake Trasimeno that we could cycle to its shores without particularly meaning to. The lake itself surprised me, neither dramatic nor postcard-perfect, but quietly insistent, with reedy margins and fishermen who appeared to be waiting for something that might never arrive. We joined them in this philosophy, spending whole mornings doing very little with great concentration.

The getting lost became our actual itinerary. One morning we set out for a recommended restaurant in Magione town and instead found ourselves in a wood of holm oaks, following a path that dissolved into wild fennel and the occasional startled lizard. We emerged at a ruined chapel, its frescoes faded to suggestions of saints, its door hanging by one hinge like a drunk leaning on a bar. No sign explained it. No visitor centre sold tickets. Just silence and the smell of thyme and the peculiar privilege of accidentally inheriting something ancient for twenty minutes.

I am not someone who normally romanticises incompetence. I like plans. I like knowing where lunch will happen. But Umbria, or perhaps our particular Magione surrounded by its accidental landscape, gradually wore this preference down. The region's famous towns, Assisi and Perugia and the rest, sat within reach but never quite demanded our attention. We visited none of them. This still feels slightly rebellious, as if we failed a test we never agreed to sit.

The local market in Magione town, when we finally found it deliberately rather than by mistake, proved small and practical and entirely unconcerned with tourists. Cheese that smelled properly dangerous. Bread still warm from someone's domestic oven. A woman selling tomatoes who explained, through elaborate gestures and my embarrassing Italian, that we were holding them wrong, that tomatoes deserved respect, that we should wait until Friday for the better ones from her cousin. We bought Wednesday's tomatoes anyway and felt forgiven.

Our final accidental discovery came on the last evening, when a wrong turning from the pool, half-dressed and dripping, led me to a terrace I had not known existed. The sunset over Lake Trasimeno did that thing where the sky appears to be showing off, layers of apricot and bruised purple that seemed almost aggressive in their beauty. I stood there in damp swimming shorts, holding a towel and a glass of the criminal wine, and thought about how thoroughly my plans had failed me, and how little I minded.

The goat, I later learned from our neighbour, was called Giuseppe. He had escaped three times that month. There was no fence that could hold him, apparently, and no particular reason to try. This seemed, by the end of the week, like a proper philosophy for the place. Some things are simply better when they wander.