Elisa, his fiancée, had left him three months before and he hadn’t quite got over it. A classic tale of woe, really. A bit spoiled, Elisa, and lacking the guts to defend her relationship with a good guy like himself – agreeable and attractive, with a solid background and a promising future, or so he liked to think – against her wealthy, stuck-up parents’ protests that he didn’t have much in the way of job prospects; that he didn’t dress with much class. He was bitter about the break-up, that much he would admit, mostly about how he’d deceived himself into thinking that he was up to their standards, to anyone’s standards. He had felt so humiliated by her rejection, their rejection, that he hadn’t made love to anyone since Elisa had left. Basically, his psychological well-being had been shot to hell. But now that he’d left the city and found himself in such a different atmosphere, so intensely pervaded by simplicity and austerity, he was beginning to feel at peace with himself. He felt rather like an athlete gearing up for a crucial meet.

He wondered whether this fortuitous state of grace would hold up in the medium and long run, or whether such isolation would shortly produce the opposite effect, driving him to flick through his address book in search of the mobile number of a tender-hearted female friend. In the end, the emotion of finding this haven and of being on the threshold of what he hoped would be an important discovery, plus the snug warmth of his bed, won out over his agonizing.

THE NEXT MORNING he introduced himself to Nicola Balestra, the regional director of NAS, the National Antiquities Service, who, it turned out, had just arrived himself a couple of weeks earlier, temporarily abandoning his main office in Florence but leaving his secretary behind to transfer important calls and forward urgent papers. Balestra had a dry, taciturn manner, and was famous for being disagreeable to the university crowd and keeping them at arm’s length, especially those – wagging tongues would have it – who prided themselves on being talkshow darlings.