As soon as he was out of sight the two younger boys were all for following him, scared but daring each other not to be. Sabatino, the eldest, put paid to that idea with a single jerk of the head. No one had confided in him about this event, but the community in which they all lived was a plangent sounding board when it came to news that might affect its members. Sabatino hadn’t heard the primary note that must have been struck somewhere, but he had unconsciously absorbed the secondary vibrations resonating in other parts of that complex instrument. ‘Danger!’ they had whispered. ‘Lie low, keep away, know nothing.’ Discarding his role as the renowned and fearless hunter of wild boar for that of the responsible senior child, he rounded up his friend Francesco and the other boy and led them down a side path back to the safety of the town.

The sole witness to what happened next was a figure surveying the scene through binoculars from a ridge about a kilometre away on the other side of the valley. The dead man followed the track until it rose above the last remaining trees and ceased to be a rough line of beaten earth and scruffy grass, to become a stony ramp hewn out of the cliff face and deeply rutted by the abrasive force of ancient iron-rimmed cart wheels. By now il morto was clearly suffering, but he struggled on, pausing frequently to gasp for breath before tackling another stretch of the scorched rock on which the soles of his feet left bloody imprints. Above his bare head, the sun hovered like a hawk in the cloudless sky.

The isolated hill he was climbing was almost circular and had been eroded down to the underlying volcanic core and then quarried for building materials, so that in appearance it was almost flat, as though sheared off with a saw.