I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a minor disaster, and our trip to Arcugnano did not disappoint. We had flown into Venice Marco Polo, collected our hire car with triumphant efficiency, and set off toward the Veneto hills feeling rather pleased with ourselves. Too pleased, as it turned out. Within forty minutes I had confidently ignored the satnav three times, convinced I knew a "more scenic route." The scenic route deposited us in a sunflower field down a dirt track, where I performed an eleven-point turn while my partner read the map upside down and a local farmer watched from his tractor with the patient amusement of a man who has seen this many times before.

By the time we found the proper road to Arcugnano, tension had settled into that particular British stew of stubbornness and embarrassment. But then we crested a hill and there it was, our holiday home tucked among cypress trees with the Euganean Hills rolling beyond it like something from a Renaissance painting. The farmer, I decided, had probably been laughing with us, not at us. Probably.

The property itself was one of those converted stone buildings that Italians seem to create effortlessly, all terracotta floors and wooden beams that have witnessed several centuries of living. Our host had left a bottle of prosecco chilling, which we opened on the terrace as the sun began dropping behind the hills. I had planned a careful itinerary for our first evening, naturally. We would unpack methodically, perhaps stroll to the village for dinner, definitely not drink sparkling wine on an empty stomach while watching swallows dart through the warm air.

We drank the entire bottle. We ate bread and cheese from a roadside shop we had passed during my navigational detour. It was, without question, the best meal of the entire holiday.

The following morning I woke with noble intentions of visiting the famous sites I had circled in my guidebook. But Arcugnano had other plans. I took what I intended to be a brief wander to orient myself, turned left where I should have turned right, and found myself on a narrow path between olive groves that seemed to lead nowhere in particular. The sort of path that sensible people avoid. I walked for twenty minutes, increasingly convinced I would need to retrace my steps in humiliation, until the trees opened onto a small clearing with a single wooden bench and a view across the valley that made me actually stop breathing for a moment.

I sat there for an hour. A woman passed with her dog, nodded without surprise at finding a dishevelled Englishman on her walking route, and continued on. I had discovered nothing significant, no landmark or monument. Just a bench, some olive trees, and silence broken only by distant church bells and something that might have been a cuckoo. I thought about how much of my travelling life I have spent marching toward destinations, checking items off lists, treating wonder as something that requires admission tickets.

That afternoon, deliberately lost, I found a bakery in what I later learned was Torri di Arcugnano, not the village I had been aiming for. The owner spoke no English, I speak barely any Italian, and we conducted an elaborate transaction of pointing and smiling that resulted in some extraordinary almond biscuits. I found a tiny chapel with its door standing open, candles burning though no one was there. I found a vineyard where an elderly man was pruning vines and simply waved me through when I gestured helplessly at my camera.

By evening I had abandoned my guidebook entirely. My partner found me on our terrace, sunburned and triumphant, clutching wine from a vineyard I could not name and biscuits from a village I could not reliably find again.

The Euganean Hills, I discovered that week, reward the wandering. The thermal springs at Abano and Montegrotto, famous since Roman times, were pleasant enough when we finally visited properly. But I preferred the small pool I stumbled upon near a woodland path, clearly known to locals, where I paddled my feet while an old man read his newspaper on a nearby rock.

I am not naturally a person who gets lost gracefully. I like plans, confirmations, knowing where the nearest toilet is. But Arcugnano taught me something about the value of confident incompetence, about the discoveries that wait when you stop trying to discover them. The farmer in the sunflower field, I now understand, was not watching a fool. He was watching someone about to have a much better holiday than they had planned.

On our final morning I attempted to find my bench again. I failed, naturally, though I found a different clearing with a different view that was equally perfect. I left a euro coin in the chapel I had found earlier, though I am not religious in the slightest. It seemed proper. Some places give you more than you pay for, and the accounting never quite balances.

We drove back to Venice without getting lost once. It felt like a small betrayal.