Firmly turning off her mobile phone she hired a car and left Florence, heading south. After a few miles she began to climb until she reached the tiny, ancient town of Fiesole.

After wandering its cobbled streets for an hour, she found a restaurant with tables on a balcony looking far down, and sat there, sipping coffee and gazing at the rows of cypresses, and the elegant villas that were laid out before her.

‘You’re in good company,’ said a quiet voice.

Rinaldo had appeared, seemingly from nowhere. She wondered how long he had been standing there, watching her.

But today, although his face was grave, there was no antagonism in it as he came to sit at her table.

‘Good company?’ she asked.

‘Your English writers, Shelley and Dickens, once admired this valley. Down there is the villa where Lorenzo de Medici entertained his literary friends. This little town is known as the mother of Florence. Look around and you’ll see why.’

Alex saw it at once. The whole panorama of Florence, barely five miles away, was spread out before them, glowing in the noon haze, the great Duomo rising out of a sea of roofs, dwarfing everything else.

‘What are you doing up here?’ he asked lightly.

‘Do I need your permission?’

‘Not at all, but wouldn’t you be better occupied negotiating? You’re a woman of business. There’s work to be done, and here you are, wasting time, staring into the distance.’

Alex didn’t normally quote poetry, but this time she couldn’t resist it.

‘What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?’

Rinaldo frowned. ‘Who said that?’

‘An English poet.’

‘An Englishman?’ he demanded on an unflattering emphasis.

‘Yes,’ she said, nettled. ‘Strange as it may seem, an Englishman wrote it. Shock! Horror! Now you might have to adjust your ideas about the English.

‘You think of me holding court, receiving my financial suitors one by one, selling you out to the highest bidder. And let’s face it, that’s how you prefer to see me.’