‘But it’s not their language, dottore, so it’s not offensive to them. It’s just an entertaining night where you can wear una maschera, a mask of another culture. Like acting in a play maybe.’ For some reason, Brian suddenly thought of the red-hot poker up the King’s arse in Marlowe’s play.

‘Contentious words in a language you barely understand? It is an interesting concept don’t you think? Do words have power if you don’t really know the meaning? What do they actually mean in that situation?’

Should be plenty change left over from the blessing for some sage advice on his situation, but the noise of the car, the priest’s rapid and frequent gear changing and the heavy braking, deep and late into every dangerous hairpin, made conversation a little difficult for the first half of the journey.

Dark oak tables and benches soaked up the gloom, facing a wooden bar, equally dark.

Balbettare had surprisingly turned out to be one of the most useful verbs in the Italian language.

Maybe Italy just had too many antiques.

‘Grazie,’ he said too loudly, and after the bubbling smoothness of the pair’s Italian honed vowels, his Australian accent bounced off the walls like a dying raven.

Airline meals were more a rite of passage than sustenance, markers that divided off the journey.

A fifty-minute drive might be a long way in Italy, but from a country which took five days, driving full-time without sleep or toilet breaks, to get across, it was a joke.