I have never been so relieved to see a donkey in all my life.

Three hours out of Rome, my hire car's sat nav decided that the road to our holiday let near Norcia was more of a suggestion than a fact. The tarmac had given way to gravel some time back, then gravel gave way to something that can only be described as "optimistic dirt." My partner sat in the passenger seat gripping the door handle, making that small humming noise she does when she's trying not to say something she'll regret. The vineyards and sunflower fields of lower Umbria had been lovely, truly, but I was beginning to suspect I had taken a wrong turn at "scenic" and ended up at "abandoned."

Then the donkey appeared. Tethered beside a stone wall that looked older than my entire family tree, it watched us with the weary patience of someone who has seen many lost tourists before. A tiny sign, hand-painted and faded, pointed left to Preci. I could have kissed that donkey.

Ten minutes later we found it: a converted farmhouse sitting among olive groves with views that made the previous hour of white-knuckle navigation feel almost worthwhile. Almost. The key was in a lockbox, the instructions were in Italian that my rusty GCSE clearly failed to prepare me for, and the hot water worked only after a ritual involving three taps, a prayer, and what I can only describe as a threatening stance toward the boiler.

We dumped our bags and did what any sensible person does when slightly traumatised and over-caffeinated. We went for a walk with no destination in mind.

This, I now believe, is the only proper way to experience this pocket of Umbria. The deliberate wander. The purposeful lack of purpose. Within twenty minutes of leaving the farmhouse, we were lost in the most magnificent fashion. A path meant for tractors became a trail through wild fennel. The fennel trail became a sheep track. The sheep track deposited us in a hollow where an elderly gentleman was tending a vegetable patch that would make any allotment enthusiast weep with envy. He spoke no English. We speak barely any Italian. He gave us tomatoes anyway, warm from the vine, and pointed us toward a church tower visible on a ridge.

The church, when we found it, was locked. Of course it was. But the view from its crumbling steps revealed a valley we would never have seen from any marked route. A hawk circled. Somewhere below, a dog barked at nothing in particular. We sat on those steps for an hour, sharing the tomatoes like the world's most basic picnic, and I felt something shift. The anxiety of the journey, the need to have done this "properly," it all went quiet.

The next morning we set out deliberately to get lost again. This time we found a spring where locals fill water bottles, its location passed between families rather than pinned on any map. We found a bakery in a village so small I cannot reliably spell its name, where the woman behind the counter spoke only in gestures and the bread was still warm. We found ourselves.

That last bit sounds terribly earnest, I know. But there is something about this landscape of folded hills and sudden views, this place where roads simply stop being roads and become something more interesting, that strips away the performance of being a tourist. You cannot perform when you are genuinely unsure where you are.

By day four, I stopped checking my phone for signal entirely. By day six, I was actively choosing the smaller path, the unmarked turning, the route that looked less promising. We discovered a ruined monastery where swallows nested in the cloisters, found a man selling pecorino from his garage, stumbled upon a village festival where we were clearly the only non-locals and were fed wine until we could barely navigate back.

The farmhouse itself became merely a base, a place to return with dusty boots and stories. The real holiday happened in the spaces between plans, in the accidental discoveries that no guidebook could replicate because they exist only in the moment of finding them.

On our final evening, we walked out again with no particular direction. The light was that golden Umbrian kind that makes photographers weep and amateurs look competent. We followed a track upward until it simply ended at a field of grazing sheep. The shepherd, a woman in her sixties with hands like weathered wood, nodded to us. We nodded back. Three humans and several hundred sheep, sharing a sunset in perfect mutual understanding.

I think about that donkey sometimes. About the kindness of handing over tomatoes to strangers. About how the best moments of that holiday were the ones I could never have planned, found only because I took a wrong turn and had the good fortune to keep going.

We have already booked to return next spring. I am deliberately not looking at maps.