I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I missed the turning for Passignano Sul Trasimeno not once, but three times. There I was, bombing down the A1 from Rome, absolutely convinced my phone's sat nav had developed a personal vendetta against me. Each time I overshot, I ended up on progressively smaller roads until I found myself behind a tractor whose driver appeared to be having a full telephone conversation while barely touching ten miles per hour. By the time I finally spotted the lake glimmering through the cypress trees, I was half an hour late, thoroughly rattled, and in desperate need of something cold and alcoholic.

The property sat perched above the town, a proper rustic stone farmhouse with terracotta roof tiles and shutters that looked like they'd weathered several centuries of Italian summers. I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of a woman who had just survived her own personal Odyssey and immediately noticed the garden sloping down towards olive groves. The owner, a cheerful local chap called Marco, handed me keys and a bottle of his own wine with the casual generosity that still surprises me about rural Italy. I later discovered this wine was absolutely lethal and responsible for one of the more enthusiastic naps of my adult life.

That first evening, determined to stretch my legs after the drive, I set off without any particular destination in mind. This is where the magic started. I took a left where I probably should have gone right, following a narrow track that wound between dry stone walls covered in wild rosemary. Within ten minutes I had no idea where I was. My phone signal had vanished entirely, which initially induced the particular panic of the chronically online, but then something wonderful happened. I stopped caring.

The track led me to a tiny chapel, barely more than a shed with a bell tower, its door unlocked and its interior cool and smelling of beeswax. There was no information plaque, no ticket booth, no other visitors. Just a rough wooden bench and a painted Madonna watching me with her usual patient expression. I sat there for twenty minutes, listening to nothing but crickets and the occasional distant bark of a dog. It was the first time in months I had genuinely stopped thinking about work emails.

Pressing on in what I hoped was the general direction of dinner, I stumbled upon an abandoned olive press, its rusted machinery still visible through a broken window, and then a natural spring where locals had rigged up a stone basin for washing vegetables. An elderly woman appeared from nowhere, filled two plastic bottles, nodded at me without the slightest surprise at finding a dishevelled Englishwoman in her path, and vanished again.

I did eventually find my way back, though I am fairly certain I walked at least three sides of a rectangle to do so. That night I ate at a trattoria in Passignano's old quarter that I never would have found deliberately, tucked down an alley so narrow I could touch both walls. The owner had no menu, just whatever his wife had decided to cook. I ate pici with wild boar ragu and drank more of that dangerous house wine, surrounded by locals who treated my terrible Italian with amused kindness rather than impatience.

The next morning I set out to get lost again, this time on purpose. I found a small beach where fishing boats were pulled up on shingle, a bakery whose owner insisted I try three different types of biscotti before purchasing anything, and a viewpoint over the lake where German tourists apparently never venture. Each discovery felt stolen, accidental, precious in a way that planned excursions rarely manage.

By the end of the week, my sense of direction had not improved in the slightest. I still took wrong turns, still ended up on roads that gradually became tracks that gradually became paths between fields. But I had stopped worrying about it entirely. There is something deeply liberating about surrendering to the possibility of being lost, of trusting that interesting things wait just around the corner you did not intend to take. I brought home no souvenirs except a bottle of Marco's wine and the certain knowledge that my best holiday moments almost always begin with taking a left where I should have gone right.