I have never been a natural navigator, and my journey to Sovramonte proved it beyond all doubt. Somewhere between Venice Marco Polo and the Dolomite foothills, my phone decided that "Italian countryside" was a sufficient address and promptly surrendered. I found myself down a gravel track, nose to nose with a very unimpressed goat, wondering how my carefully planned Veneto escape had come to this. The goat, I should note, was the first local to offer any sort of direction. I chose to interpret its stare as "turn around, you fool."

Three wrong turns later, I finally spotted the stone walls and wooden balconies of the property, tucked into a hillside that felt deliberately secretive. The owners had left the key in a ceramic pot by the door, which I only found after knocking on the wrong building entirely and disturbing someone's afternoon nap. A small dog barked at me with the weary resignation of someone who had seen this performance many times before.

The first evening, I set out with absolutely no plan beyond "walk until something interesting happens." This is not my usual approach. I am the person who researches restaurant reviews for forty-five minutes before choosing where to eat. But something about the quiet here, the way the light sat heavily on the meadows, made me reckless. I followed a path that seemed to lead nowhere in particular, which turned out to be precisely the point.

I found a chapel. Not a grand one, nothing that would appear in any guidebook, just a tiny stone building with a rusted gate and wildflowers growing through the cracks in its steps. The door was unlocked. Inside, someone had left fresh candles and a handwritten note dated three weeks prior, thanking Saint Anthony for a grandson's recovery. I sat on the single wooden pew for twenty minutes, listening to nothing but my own breathing and the occasional creak of cooling stone. I am not religious in any conventional sense, but I found myself wanting to leave something behind too. All I had was a packet of mints. I left one on the altar and immediately felt ridiculous, then strangely peaceful about the ridiculousness.

The following morning, I got deliberately lost again. This time I followed a stream that I could hear but not see, pushing through overgrown hazel bushes until I emerged in a clearing where an elderly man was tending beehives. He spoke no English. I speak restaurant-menu Italian at best. We managed a conversation anyway, mostly through gestures and shared grins, and he pressed a jar of honey into my hands that I suspect cost him considerably more effort than the few euros I offered. The honey tastes of chestnut and something else I cannot identify. I have been eating it on everything, including direct spoonfuls at midnight, feeling slightly feral and entirely content.

I found a swimming hole on day three, though "found" suggests more intention than the reality. I slipped on a muddy bank, grabbed a branch to save myself, and realised I could hear water falling somewhere below. Ten careful minutes later, I was standing at the edge of a pool fed by a small waterfall, completely alone, surrounded by ferns and the particular green silence of hidden water. I swam in my underwear, something I have not done since I was fourteen and considerably less self-conscious about my body. The cold shocked me properly awake. I dried on a flat rock like some sort of lizard, watching a kingfisher dart across the pool, feeling the unfamiliar sensation of having absolutely nowhere else I needed to be.

Each evening, I return to Sovramonte with some new accidental discovery. A vineyard where the owner waved me in for an impromptu tasting. A bakery in what I thought was someone's garage, selling bread that made me understand why people write poems about carbohydrates. A viewpoint where the sunset turns the whole valley the colour of ripe apricots, which I stumbled upon while fleeing an unexpected rainstorm.

The mishap of getting lost has become the entire point. I have stopped trying to plan anything beyond breakfast, and even that has become increasingly approximate. Yesterday I ate at eleven in the morning because I followed a path that turned out to be longer than it looked, and I found a cafe in a village I still cannot name, where the coffee was strong enough to make my hands shake pleasantly for an hour afterwards.

I came to Veneto expecting to tick things off a list. Instead, I have learned that my list was the problem all along. The goat knew. I should have trusted the goat.