The Sat Nav had other ideas about how to reach Monterchi. I am fairly certain it tried to send me up a goat track somewhere near Citta di Castello, and there I was in a Fiat 500 that had seen better days, clutching a phone with three percent battery and a rapidly evaporating sense of adventure. The funny thing about Umbrian roads is that they look perfectly sensible on a map. In reality they narrow to the width of a determined cyclist without warning, and suddenly you are eyeballing a local in a battered Panda who clearly has right of way and zero intention of yielding it.

I arrived at the property with what I can only describe as agricultural levels of sweat and a newfound respect for people who drive tractors for a living. The owner, a wiry chap called Franco who spoke approximately eleven words of English, took one look at me and wordlessly produced a cold beer. This is the sort of hospitality that needs no translation.

The house itself sat perched on a slope with views that made me forget entirely about the near-death experience. Terracotta tiles, weathered stone, that particular faded green of shutters that have baked in Italian sun for decades. I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of a man who had been driving for six hours and promptly got lost again within five minutes of setting out for a wander.

Here is what nobody tells you about Monterchi. The village is tiny, properly tiny, and the joy of it is precisely that. I took a wrong turn looking for what I thought was a path to a viewpoint and found myself in someone's olive grove instead. An old woman hanging washing regarded me with magnificent indifference. I did the universal mime of "terribly sorry, foreign idiot," and she responded by pointing at a gap between two cypress trees that I would never have spotted in a hundred years.

Through that gap lay a track that led to a tiny chapel I later learned was the Madonna del Parto, famous for a Piero della Francesca fresco that apparently draws art historians from across the globe. I found it completely empty, door ajar, sunlight falling through a high window onto stone flags worn smooth by centuries of feet. There was no ticket desk, no audio guide, just me and Piero's pregnant Madonna staring at each other in the silence. I had not planned this. I had planned to find a supermarket and perhaps some more beer.

The getting lost became something of a theme. Each morning I would set out with vague intentions and promptly abandon them. A path that looked like it led to the village square would instead deposit me at a farm where a man named Aldo kept donkeys and insisted I try his pecorino. Another afternoon I followed what I believed was a marked trail and ended up at a ruined tower with views across to Tuscany, eating wild figs I had picked from a tree and feeling impossibly pleased with myself.

There was a moment, perhaps day three, when I realised I had stopped checking my phone for directions entirely. The panic of the first day, the Sat Nav betrayal, the fear of wandering into someone's private land uninvited, it had all dissolved into something else. A willingness to be surprised. An acceptance that the wrong turn might be the right one after all.

I found a swimming hole in the Tiber river this way, though the Tiber up here bears little resemblance to the grand affair that flows through Rome. It is modest, quick, perfect for plunging into after walking too far in too much heat. Local teenagers showed me where to jump from, though I wisely declined their more ambitious suggestions. I found a bakery in a hamlet I could not name, where the bread came out of a wood-fired oven and the woman running it communicated entirely through gestures and the occasional burst of laughter at my attempts to order.

The property itself became a sort of base camp for glorious incompetence. Each evening I would return with some new discovery, some cheese or wine or story of accidental trespass, and Franco would nod as if this was exactly how things should be. He never once suggested I might plan better. He understood, I think, that the planning was precisely the problem.

On my final morning I got lost one last time, deliberately this time, following a track upward through oak woods until I found a clearing with a single stone bench. I sat there for an hour watching swallows dart above the valley and thought about how rarely I allow myself this particular pleasure at home. The not knowing. The gentle surrender to whatever comes next.

I drove back to the airport with the Sat Nav firmly switched off, navigating by instinct and the occasional road sign, and arrived somehow in perfect time for my flight. Some things, it turns out, you cannot plan for. Some things you should not even try.