I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when the sat nav decided Monte Santa Maria Tiberina was more of a suggestion than an actual destination. We had been winding through Umbria for the better part of three hours, my other half navigating with the confidence of someone who once spent a weekend in Lake Como and now considers himself practically Italian. The villa was meant to be straightforward. A left at Citta di Castello, follow the signs, bob's your uncle. Except there were no signs, or at least none that agreed with each other, and by the time we hit our third dead end on a gravel track barely wide enough for a determined goat, I was beginning to wonder if the property even existed.

The mishap came at the worst possible moment. I had insisted on stopping at a tiny alimentari near Pietralunga for provisions, emerging triumphantly with pecorino, local lentils, and a bottle of Sagrantino that I was assured was "molto buono." Back in the car, balanced on my lap like a precious infant, the bag took a corner with more enthusiasm than physics allows. The bottle survived. The lentils, less so. They scattered across the footwell with the quiet drama of a thousand tiny projectiles, rolling under seats and into crevices I suspect exist in that Fiat specifically to torment people like me. We spent twenty minutes in a layby, fishing them out with sticky hands and muttered apologies to each other, the cheese sweating gently in the afternoon heat.

By the time we actually found the turning, marked by nothing more than a weathered stone and what I later learned was an olive tree older than most countries, I was ready to weep with relief. The drive up to Monte Santa Maria Tiberina proper is something else. The village sits perched on its ridge like it has been there since the beginning of time and frankly doubts your right to join it. We parked in a slant of golden light, the kind that makes everything look like a film set, and stood there like idiots, just breathing it in.

The villa itself was down a narrow lane, past a wall where someone had left a bicycle in approximately 1974 and never collected it. Roses everywhere, scrambling over stone, the sort of unchecked abundance that makes you feel simultaneously delighted and slightly judged for your own garden efforts back in Surrey. Our key was in a lockbox that required the dexterity of a safecracker and the patience of a saint, but eventually we stumbled through the door into cool tile and the smell of rosemary drifting through open shutters.

I will not pretend the first evening was sophisticated. We sat on the terrace with the surviving wine, picking stray lentils out of the car upholstery with the dedication of archaeologists, watching the Tiber valley dissolve into layers of blue and violet. Somewhere a dog barked, and someone was cooking with garlic, and the whole thing felt so utterly, impossibly foreign in the most comforting way. I had packed books I intended to read, plans I intended to keep, a whole personality I had constructed for this holiday. Within hours, the lentils had defeated me, and I could not have been more grateful.

That first morning, I woke before dawn from habit and confusion, crept out to find the village utterly still. A cat regarded me with the contempt cats reserve for tourists. I found a tiny bar opening for coffee, the owner not speaking a word of English, me not speaking enough Italian, both of us managing perfectly through gestures and goodwill. I got lost on the way back, naturally, down passages that narrowed to shoulder width, past doorways where washing hung like faded flags. Every wrong turn revealed something I would never have found otherwise: a shrine to the Madonna tucked into a wall, a view through an archway that framed the valley like a painting, an old man tending geraniums with the gravity of a priest at his devotions.

By the time I found the villa again, my coffee was cold, my feet were aching, and I had never felt more pleased with myself. The getting lost, I realised, was not the interruption to the holiday. It was the point of it. Somewhere between the lentil disaster and the dawn wanderings, I had stopped trying to make the experience match my expectations and simply let it be what it was. Messy, unexpected, slightly ridiculous, and entirely wonderful.