Father Fanfarone, always referred to as his `chaplain', was Cossa's favourite priest because Fanfarone had so little interest in religion that he never annoyed Cossa with urgings that he confessor attend mass and because he was so blissfully stupid He was a fairly good forger and was assigned to keep up a cheerful correspondence with the duke in Cossa's name and writing. The duke had decided that a chaplain with Cossa's permanent household would create a most favourable impression upon the university prelates who would report student progress to Rome.

The second man in our entourage, as far as I was concerned, was Geoffredano Bocca, the master cook of the Cossa fleet. His bracioline made with beef, ham, breadcrumbs and parsley were the finest sausages I have ever eaten and within me was the sausage-eating compulsion of hundreds of thousands of frozen Germans. I tell you that, when he laid out layers of wide noodles with-alternating layers composed of that same compelling bracioline in minced form, then added his own secret sauce, then hard-boiled egg and two kinds of those cheeses which have made Italy the triumph of body and mind that it is, then sprinkled with what he says is just grated cheese but which anyone who has ever tasted it knows is the powder of a master alchemist, I renounced once again – it happened every day I ate Bocca's cooking – Germany and all the world except Naples. Before each meal he cooked for me, he would say with that mysterious smile, `I am going to put something secret in your food. I will not say what it is, but after you eat it you are going to be able to do things like you have never done them before.'

The third man was a silent physician from the Adige (which the Italians consider as being far to the north!), Count Abramo Weiler, a healer who was bound to the Cossas because of his compulsion for ruinous gambling. The duke cured him by taking him aside and telling him that he would kill hire if he ever gambled again. He said that, whether he killed hint himself on Procida or in Naples, or whether he had to send men to kill him wherever Count Weiler chose to gamble, he would disembowel him and leave him to die in terrible pain, alone. Weiler told me that he totally lost interest in gambling after, that, but still continued to calculate the odds on almost everything, if only in his head.