He did not return to the site of the ambush until the following year. By then the war was over and its victims had started to take on the marmoreal, exemplary status of martyrs and mythic heroes. At the bend in the road where Angelin died — but on the other side, as though he’d been part of the main action — a plinth had been erected, bearing his name, a date and the words: ‘Here he fell for Italy beneath the lead of a barbaric enemy’. A faded wreath in the national colours garlanded the stone tablet. Angelin’s ex-comrade had read the inscription without the slightest flicker of expression. Then, making sure no one was watching, he climbed down into the woods below and commenced his excavations.

For several years it continued like this. Some seasons he got a heavy yield, others little or nothing. Truffles were like that: capricious, female and unpredictable. It was part of their considerable mystique. Lacking the late Angelin’s nose for their pungent scent — no doubt nature’s compensation for his deficiencies in other respects — he used a tabui, one of the carefully bred and trained mongrels which have the ability to home in on any example of tuber magnatum Pico within a ten-metre radius.

The lode which Angelin had discovered on this unregarded strip of wasteland at the edge of the Vincenzo property was not his only hunting ground, but returns during the early years had still been modest. He kept a few of the smaller tubers for his own use, and sold the rest either to middle-men in the informal market held every morning in the back streets of Alba, or directly to a variety of restaurants and local connoisseurs. Considering that the outlay consisted only of his time, which was of no value, the returns were reasonable. Along with some casual labour, part-time haulage and odd jobs in the handyman line, it added up to a modest living.