‘I can appreciate your point of view,’ his host’s voice boomed from the darkness ahead. ‘I myself grew up in the estuary of the Po, and we drank the local rotgut — heavily watered to make it palatable — as a sort of medicine to aid digestion and kill off undesirable germs. But perhaps there is some other way I can make you understand. Surely you must at some time have collected something. Postage stamps, butterflies, first editions, firearms, badges, matchboxes…’

‘What’s that got to do with wine?’

The famous director, known to his equally famous friends as Giulio, stopped and turned, admitting Zen back into the feeble nimbus of light.

‘The object of the collection is as unimportant as the quantities inserted in an algebraic formula. To the collector, all that matters is selection and completeness. It is an almost exclusively male obsession, an expression of our need to control the world. Women rarely collect anything except shoes and jewellery. And lovers, of course.’

Zen did not reply. His host pointed the torch up at the curved ceiling of stone slabs.

‘The nitre! It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are now below Via del Corso. Young men, my sons perhaps included, are racing up and down in their cars as they once did on their horses, yet not a murmur of that senseless frenzy reaches us here. The wine sleeps like the dead.’

‘I used to have a collection of railway tickets,’ Zen remarked.

Giulio flashed a smile.

‘I knew it!’

A dry rustling amongst the bottles to his left made Zen start.

‘Rats,’ said the famous director. ‘You were saying?’

‘My father…’

Zen hesitated, as though at a loss, then started again.

‘He worked for the railways, and he used to bring them back for me, little cardboard tickets with the name of the destination printed on them, the class and the fare paid. By the end I had one to all the stations as far as Verona, Rovigo, Udine and Trieste…’