Getting to our little place near Umbertide began, as all the best holidays do, with me being absolutely convinced I knew better than the sat nav. "It's taking us the long way round," I announced to my partner, who was wedged in the passenger seat with a cool bag on her lap and a look of long-suffering patience. Twenty minutes later we were on something that could generously be called a farm track, surrounded by olive groves and absolutely no signs of human civilisation. My phone had given up entirely. The hire car, a Fiat so small I could practically feel every pebble through the floor, was making a noise I chose to ignore.

We emerged eventually into a tiny hamlet where an elderly gent was leaning on a wall in that particularly Italian way that suggests he has been there since approximately 1962. I attempted my best "scusi" and asked, with wild hand gestures, for Umbertide. He squinted at me, said something I couldn't catch, then pointed not back the way we'd come but down an even narrower lane. I drove on pure faith. Ten minutes of held breath and scraped wing mirrors later, there it was: our stone farmhouse, sitting among cypress trees with the Tiber valley rolling out below like someone had painted it specially.

The mishap, it turned out, was the making of everything.

That first evening, too giddy to stay in, we wandered out with no plan beyond finding somewhere to eat. We took a wrong turn almost immediately, missing the road into Umbertide proper and ending up instead at what looked like a abandoned agricultural building. Except it wasn't abandoned. Light spilled from a cracked-open door, and music - live music, someone playing guitar quite badly but with tremendous feeling. We hovered like the uncertain British people we are, until a woman emerged with a plate of something fried and basically shooed us inside. It was a sagra, we eventually gathered, some local festival for a saint I'd never heard of. We ate porchetta sandwiches that dripped down our wrists, drank wine from plastic cups, and danced with people whose names we never learned. We had not planned this. We had not read about it. We had simply got lost and been claimed by kindness.

The next morning, determined to be more organised, we set out to explore Umbertide itself. We found the market, admired the Collegiata, had a perfectly pleasant coffee. But the afternoon went sideways again when I insisted on following a footpath that seemed to lead nowhere on the map. It led, after a sweaty hour, to a tiny chapel called the Madonna del Bagno, covered in ceramic plaques left by grateful pilgrims. A woman was there sweeping the steps, and she talked at us for twenty minutes about miracles and floods and something to do with a cow, of which I understood perhaps one word in ten but felt utterly welcomed nonetheless.

By day three we stopped fighting it. Getting lost became the point. We found a vineyard where no one spoke English and we communicated through pointing and enthusiastic nodding, ending up with a case of wine we hadn't intended to buy and a recommendation for a lake we'd never heard of. The lake, when we found it - and we did get lost finding it - had a single wooden jetty and water so clear you could watch fish ignoring you. We swam, dried on warm stone, and ate bread and pecorino we'd picked up from a farm shop that appeared like a mirage when another wrong turn deposited us on its doorstep.

Umbertide itself is lovely, don't mistake me. The castle, the piazza, the slow rhythm of proper Italian town life. But I barely remember the things we meant to do. What stays with me is the chapel, the sagra, the lake, the vineyard, the farm shop - none of them in any guidebook I have seen, all of them gifts from the simple art of not knowing where you are going.

On our last evening we sat on the terrace of our farmhouse with that accidentally purchased wine, watching the sun drop behind hills that had become familiar through wandering rather than planning. My partner raised her glass. "To getting lost," she said. I clinked mine against it, grateful for the sat nav's betrayal, grateful for my own stubborn wrongness, grateful most of all for a place that rewards the wandering with wonders you cannot find on purpose.