One of Edgardo Ugo’s seminarial chestnuts was that, in our post-meaning culture, to move from the sublime to the ridiculous and vice versa no longer required even a single step, merely an alternative selection from an infinite interpretational menu. When he’d brought this line up in the opening seminar of the semester, Rodolfo had replied, ‘Excuse me, professore. Are you saying that if a recording of the slow movement of Mozart’s K364 is being played in the cell where a political prisoner is undergoing torture, his or her resulting experience is simply a function of consumer choice?’ Ugo had sensed that Mattioli was trouble right then and there. Knowing the Kochel catalogue number of the Sinfonia Concertante, for example. That was a leaf straight out of Ugo’s own book: awe them with your command of arcane documented minutiae, and they’ll swallow your big contentious thesis without a murmur.

But today Mattioli had gone too far, not only proclaiming that words had meanings, but that the relationship between language and reality, although labile and demanding constant and close attention, was by its nature (!) both authentic and verifiable. ‘The fact remains that there is a real world which exists independently of any possible representation of it, and which in turn conditions any such representation,’ he had concluded, with the air of the young Luther nailing his theses to the church door.

Edgardo had handled this arrant nonsense with his usual urbane charm, even getting a round of appreciative laughter from the other students for his learned humour when he suggested sarcastically that to invoke Giambattista Vico’s ‘ sensus communis generis humani ’ was hardly Scienza Nuova -more laughter-at this late date. Nevertheless, enough was enough. Standards had to be maintained and essential truths upheld. As he had told Rodolfo, it would have been dereliction of duty for him to have acted otherwise. So why did he have this slight sense of uncleanliness, as when you get a bit of meat or spinach stuck between your teeth and can’t quite remove it with your tongue?