The satnav gave up on us roughly three miles outside Marano di Valpolicella, which I took as a personal affront given I'd paid extra for the European maps package. One moment we were cruising through vineyards that looked like they'd been painted by someone with a very relaxed attitude to straight lines, the next we were down a gravel track flanked by cypress trees that seemed to be closing in like polite but firm bouncers.

"We're not lost," I announced to my partner, who had that particular expression she saves for when I am, in fact, quite lost. "We're exploring."

The gravel became dirt. The dirt became something I can only describe as "agricultural suggestion." Our hire car, a Fiat 500 that had seemed charmingly compact in Verona, now felt like a Land Rover Discovery as it clattered over ruts and potholes. I spotted a nonna watching from her garden, arms folded, clearly enjoying the entertainment. I waved. She did not wave back.

Then, miracle of miracles, the track spat us out onto a proper road, and there it was: our holiday home, perched on a hillside with views that made me immediately forgive every wrong turn. The stone walls were that warm honey colour you only seem to get in Italy, and someone had planted geraniums in terracotta pots with the confident abandon of a person who knows exactly what they're doing.

The key was in a lockbox, which I opened on my third attempt after realising I'd been entering the code upside down. The door swung inward with a satisfying creak, and we stepped into cool darkness that smelled of wood polish and something faintly herby. Rosemary, maybe, or the ghost of someone's dinner from last week.

I made straight for the terrace, because priorities, and promptly walked into a mosquito net that I had somehow failed to notice. My partner, who had followed more carefully, found this hilarious. I stood there, slightly tangled, looking out at the Valpolicella hills rolling away in waves of green and gold, and decided that being laughed at was a small price to pay.

The next morning, determined to redeem my navigational reputation, I set off on foot to find coffee. I took a left where I should have taken a right, or possibly a right where I should have taken a left, and within ten minutes I was somewhere that definitely wasn't on any map I'd studied. The vineyards here were older, the vines gnarled and twisting, and the path narrowed to a track between dry stone walls that had probably been built before my great-great-grandparents were born.

I found a chapel. Not a church, mind you, nothing so grand as that, just a tiny chapel with a wooden door and a fresco above it that had faded to suggestions of blue and gold. The door was unlocked. Inside, three candles burned in front of a Madonna who looked distinctly unimpressed with my sense of direction. I sat on the single wooden bench and listened to nothing but birdsong and the distant clank of someone doing something agricultural.

I never did find that coffee. I found something better, though I didn't recognise it at the time. Back at the house, my partner had made tea with the emergency supplies, and we sat on that terrace as the light shifted from afternoon gold to evening rose, and I told her about my chapel.

"So you got lost again," she said.

"Completely," I admitted.

She smiled. "Good."

The week unfolded like that. A wrong turn on the way to buy bread led us to a vineyard where an old man pressed wine from his own grapes and insisted we try it at nine in the morning. A shortcut that definitely wasn't shorter deposited us at a viewpoint where no coach tours stopped, where we ate sandwiches and watched clouds move across the Adige valley like herds of silent animals. We found a trattoria so unmarked that we walked past it twice, where the owner explained the menu by pointing at things and making appreciative noises, and where the risotto tasted of patience and butter and something I couldn't identify.

Each discovery came with the same slight anxiety, the same internal question of whether we'd ever find our way back, the same gradual surrender to not knowing. I started to recognise the feeling, to seek it out deliberately, taking the smaller road, the unsigned path, the turning that looked interesting and probably wasn't.

On our final evening, I walked out alone after dinner, no destination in mind, just the need to move in the cooling air. The vineyards were silver in the moonlight, the vines casting shadows that seemed to shift and gesture. I found myself on a track I'd walked before, or perhaps one very like it, and I stopped, and I stood there, and I understood something about myself that I'd been avoiding.

I spend so much of my life knowing exactly where I'm going, optimising routes, maximising efficiency, treating deviation as failure. Here, getting lost had become the whole point. The wrong turns hadn't been mistakes at all. They'd been the only way to find what I didn't know I was looking for.

I found my way back eventually, though I couldn't have told you how. The house was warm with light, my partner reading on the terrace with a glass of that morning's wine discovery. I sat down beside her, slightly breathless, slightly dusty, entirely content.

"Nice walk?" she asked.

"Got lost," I said.

She didn't look up from her book, but I could see her smile. "Good."