The library that holds Giulia’s papers is on the second floor of a building three streets back from the river, and you get in by filling in a form that asks for your profession, your reason, and the name of somebody who will vouch for you. She deposited the lot in 2011, after a chest infection and a tax inspection arrived in the same fortnight and convinced her she would die at sixty and be misremembered. Fourteen boxes then. Nineteen now.
We went for three days in the second week of November, because there were four readings in chapter five we could not settle out of the air, and because I have reached the stage of a working life where I will travel nine hundred kilometres rather than write a footnote saying the reading is uncertain.
That is the honest professional account of the trip. It is complete. I want…
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