So Signora Pina, seeing that it was low season and her regulars wouldn’t show up for at least an hour or so, sat down to keep Fabrizio company and began to tell him the story of the palace of the Caretti-Riccardi princes, empty for the last forty years except for a brief period when the current owner, Count Jacopo Ghirardini, had moved in, four or five years ago. He had taken in a woman, a cleaning lady supposedly, but everyone said she was more of a witch, and then he’d vanished. Just like that. Into thin air. No one had heard of him since. The woman, she was still around, she’d opened a tavern outside of town at a place called Le Macine. Since the count’s disappearance, not a living soul had set foot inside. A pity, wasn’t it, a sin, such a big, beautiful palace with no doubt a fabulous view from the top floor of the entire valley?

‘Must be full of ghosts, then,’ suggested Fabrizio, giving her a little rope.

‘It’s no joke, Doctor,’ replied Pina with a touch of indignation. ‘I, who have lived here since I was born, can tell you that anyone who has gone into that building has heard things and seen things. And how! Why, ages ago, there was a porter working at the mill over at La Bruciata, strong as an elephant and built like an ox. Well, he was always boasting about how he was afraid of nothing, and one day he made a bet with his friends at the local tavern that he could spend the night there—’

‘And when he came out in the morning his hair had turned white overnight,’ suggested Fabrizio, interrupting her story.

‘How did you know that?’ asked Pina with genuine surprise.

Fabrizio would have liked to tell her that stories such as hers were told in every region of Italy, tales of hidden treasure, of secret passageways stretching out for kilometres underground that linked one building to another, of golden goats that appeared at night to solitary wayfarers in the vicinity of a crossroads. An entire arsenal of stories and legends invented over the centuries before television started muddling people’s minds.