An everlasting ticking chirped amongst the shelves of the Horologius clockmaker’s shop. Grains of sand trickled through the hourglass in the hand of a brass prince who watched his own lifetime ebb away. Beside the shop door, the wheels of a longcase clock clattered, from whose darkness only the copper-red minute hand — fashioned in the shape of a gondola complete with a flattened gondolier figure — thrust itself into the light. Pale light fell from the open workshop door onto the shoulders of a kneeling bronze Samson, who held a clock face in his hands. Mantel clocks and table clocks sang from the wall shelves, conducted by a Florentine model: a seated girl with an ermine in her lap leaned against the left column bearing an enamelled clock face, whilst a suspiciously gazing turbaned figure flanked the right side with a sword.

The last grain of sand fell into the lower half of the hourglass. Seven times the longcase clock with its brass gondolier chimed, the pocket watches clicked, the turbaned figure struck his sword against a small bell, and an Asian gong reverberated in the clockwork orchestra.

The finale was crowned by the shriek of an ugly, raven-like bird that shot seven times from a wall clock and squawked discordantly.

With the final signal, silence settled over the clockmaker’s shop. It was that silence which, after concerts and choral masses, takes possession of a room — waiting, holding itself back, anticipating applause. Not a sound dared emerge from any of the casings, for this was the moment in which silence itself could be heard.

The conductor stepped onto the stage. A three-armed brass candelabrum preceded him. The candlelight accentuated the lines and lozenges upon his pale blue robe. A snow-white silk shirt shimmered beneath it at cuffs and collar.

His North English shoes struck the floorboards of the shop. The muffled sound united itself with the returning tick of the clocks. His shadow wandered along the wood-panelled wall, tracing the silhouette of a man of middling height — and came to rest upon the walnut casing of the longcase clock. Candlelight danced in the chased patterns of box clock lids upon the window ledge.

Lucius Horologius, the first and only clockmaker of Palatina, looked out upon the Piazza. Darkness had settled over the city an hour since. On the far side of the square, lights glowed in the upper storeys and illuminated the last carts and carriages that rattled over the cobblestones. The Taleggio cooperage opposite had already closed; apparently because Taleggio’s journeymen had once again hoodwinked their deaf master into believing that the cathedral bell tower had long since struck the hour. Whilst they raised their wine cups in the nearest tavern, the merchant Fontina was catching his assistant by the collar again and dragging him back into the corner shop. The pealing of bells signified for Fontina not the end of the working day, but was rather an unwelcome reminder that his subordinates were also obliged to eat and sleep — lest, given their already overstrained working efficiency, they should eventually collapse.

The clockmaker’s gaze wandered to his right. Beyond the square, the Rio, the great river, rolled its waters through the city. Torches at the sterns of gondolas bespoke the city’s wealthy élite, who were being rowed homeward — or towards their next diversion. The boats flitted across the black waters like fireflies. Behind them rose the pilasters of the Ponte dello Stagno — the Tin Bridge — upon which the fires of the forges and smithies flashed. Grey smoke billowed from the chimneys of dozens of houses crammed together upon the Gothic bridge arches. Quenching water hissed between the hammer blows of the smiths. Waste water ran through tin pipes as fountains into the river. The interlocking tenements of San Pietro loomed like monsters in silhouette against the distant sky.

One moment Lucius was still watching the activity upon the bridge. The farriers closing their establishments. The tool smiths who remained. Then the founders, already passing before the shop door. He thought of how this world had nothing in common with his perfectly calibrated clocks, which struck each evening in unison at the precise moment. He thought of how this was the hour for which thousands of Palatines had been waiting.

And he thought that he was perhaps the only person in this city who begrudged the close of the working day.

The next moment, the window reflected only the clockmaker himself. He looked into his own grey-blue eyes. Candelabrum light fell upon his neatly trimmed, light brown beard. Mid-length hair and a black cap framed his face. It was the face of a man in his mid-thirties who had come to Italy with great expectations — and now stood before great difficulties.

Palatina had fifty thousand inhabitants. The city was accounted one of the wealthiest in central Italy. His shop stood on the principal thoroughfare of the city. Lucius had wondered that he should be not merely the only, but the very first clockmaker in the history of this city.

After a month, he knew better. Every clockmaker was fated to despair of Palatina. There was not a single public clock in existence. Each district insisted upon the bell strokes of its own campanile. Which meant, in practice, that San Paolo rang its bells earlier than San Pietro or the Città Nuova, in order to be ahead of its neighbours. Taleggio’s journeymen did everything in their power to prevent their master from being able to read the time anywhere. The smiths did not conclude their day’s labour at seven o’clock in the evening, but rather “around” seven. This was more than ignorance. It was a way of life. Germans and Italians alike built the finest clocks in Europe — Lucius knew this well enough. Yet it was chiefly the Germans who actually made use of them.

In his native York, the Horologius clockmaker’s shop had enjoyed a reputation extending well beyond the region. Merchants from London and gentry from the provinces had made the journey on his account. Yet since his removal to Palatina, he had not sold so much as a single table clock. Neither had his new clock model, with its melodious bird-shrieking, proved persuasive to any customer. The only customer who had come in had been so thoroughly startled by its striking that she had fled the shop in a panic.

The clockmaker stroked his beard. Perhaps the device could still be converted into a serviceable alarm.

Then he breathed deeply. Lucius had waited long enough.

Keys clinked against the metal of the candelabrum. His hand slid towards the brass clock face that formed the door knob — until a rapping interrupted the ticking. Gloved fingers knocked against glass.

And although the clockmaker, in contrast to the Palatine tendency towards dilatoriness, believed in firm English principles such as punctuality and adherence to rules, he hesitated only briefly before setting down the key and opening the shop door instead.

“We are closed.”

Lucius waited in the doorway. Upon the threshold stood a gentleman, more or less of an age with himself. Tall in stature. Slender. Beneath lightly curled hair, dark eyes rested — fixed upon the clockmaker.

“Forgive me. You are the Englishman?”

Lucius endeavoured to make out details. But the stranger stood half in darkness. His black garment concealed the rest.

“Horologius,” the clockmaker corrected — thereby making plain that he thought little of persons who did not address him by name, but instead presumed to give him one.

The stranger nodded. Lucius noticed a glinting at the man’s lapel.

“And you are …?”

The glinting proved to be a golden lily at the coat collar.

“Raffaele di Tesino. From the Città Antica.”

Lucius possessed the gift of not widening his eyes when a situation surprised him. He had lived too long in sober York for that. Instead, his ears lifted the very smallest degree, for this was the sort of customer he had long been waiting for.

The Città Antica was the seat of the wealthy and powerful. They resided in villas and palazzi upon the Palatine, the city’s principal hill. Whoever lived there could afford a clock — with golden cog wheels and an enamelled clock face.

“Well then, di Tesino,” Lucius began with studied composure, “would you not prefer to call tomorrow morning?”

“Tomorrow I have no time.”

“I am a clockmaker. I sell time.”

Raffaele smiled.

“Then you are precisely the man I am looking for. If I might step inside?”

Lucius remained wary. Much as he wished to win this customer — men of influence who appeared after closing time wearing black cloaks brought trouble with them. One need not have lived in Italy to know as much. Those who did not know such simple rules, after all, no longer lived at all.

The man from the Città Antica must have sensed the mistrust that was building between himself and the clockmaker, growing ever more impenetrable, until Lucius would bar his way entirely.

But Tesino brought the metaphysical wall crashing down before the clockmaker had been able to raise it.

“What would you say,” remarked Raffaele, as though in passing, “to repairing a clock for me that is worth a whole county?”

*

The candelabrum cleared a table, sweeping paper, drawings, and quill pens along with it. Not so much as a dust particle remained upon the wooden surface. With a crash, Lucius rammed the brass into the centre, so that drops of wax spattered across the beech-wood grain.

A chair scraped aside. Black fabric billowed through the air for a moment. The golden lily on Raffaele’s coat flashed.

“You keep flexible opening hours. I approve of that, Ser Horologius.”

In the background, the window shutters squeaked. Lucius let the bolt fall home.

“I should rather approve if you came to the point.”

The clockmaker’s shop resembled a Venetian fortress in a state of siege. Not even Ottoman cannon fire could have breached the small establishment on the Tin Square. Lucius had double-bolted the window. The door was shut. Every candle save the three on the candelabrum had been extinguished.

There remained only the flickering over the beechwood, Raffaele’s cool countenance, and the ticking of the clocks.

Then a new object entered the scene. Red gold gleamed before the candelabrum. The reflection dazzled the clockmaker so greatly that he was obliged to narrow his eyes. Lucius held his hand before his brow and ventured a cautious squinting glance towards the table.

A pocket watch swung to and fro on a chain. Raffaele allowed the clockmaker his time; Lucius’s head followed the oscillations, as though determined not to lose a single detail from sight.

“I have seen no such model, either in England or in Italy,” the clockmaker remarked. “What manner of clock is this?”

“A bespoke commission.”

“All pocket watches are. But a piece of this sort — of this size — could scarcely be afforded by anyone less than a prince.”

“You are good,” said Raffaele approvingly. “The clock belonged to my father. The Count of Tesino.”

Until this moment the clockmaker had had eyes only for the pocket watch. For its peculiarity lay in its size. In its form. In its ornamentation. In its melodious ticking, which fitted so harmoniously into his remaining collection as though it had always been part of it.

But it was dawning upon Lucius that the surname of the former owner could be no coincidence. Raffaele bore the same name, after all.

“You will forgive my ignorance — I am still new to Palatina,” the Englishman forestalled any objection, “but is this Tesino part of the Republic?”

Raffaele arrested the pendulum motion. He drew the watch back. Lucius noticed a flickering in the dark eyes of the Tesino, who waited for a moment.

Lucius knew that people reacted thus only when they had something to conceal.

“The valley of Tesino, from which my family originates, lies on the border between Trentino and the Republic of Venice,” Raffaele stated curtly. “Everything further is of no consequence whatsoever to this transaction.”

Lucius stroked his beard. He might take note of this and hold his peace. But there were inconsistencies pressing themselves forward that clung to this story. Such as the circumstance that the Trentino lay hundreds of miles distant. And that it appeared decidedly suspicious when an heir apparent should carry his father’s legacy with him so very far from home.

Palatina was a small state. But one that offered refuge in the turmoil of this new age. It was the epoch of the liberal arts. Of religious persecution. Of the Italian Wars. And all of them sought out this oasis in the desert of European madness.

Even Catholic York had not been able to hold out indefinitely against Protestant London. The English Reformation had closed the monasteries upon which the economy of his native city had depended. The end of Catholicism had signified the decline of York.

Lucius therefore understood only too well what Raffaele left unspoken.

“You are a refugee.”

“I prefer ‘exile with a fixed domicile and fair-weather prospects,’” Raffaele emphasised. “Not everyone who has been driven from his homeland can call a palace of seventy-two rooms his own in a foreign country.”

Lucius briefly calculated how many rooms his own house contained, and resolved thereafter to hold his peace.

“Come here,” the exile continued. “You have not yet seen anything.”

Lucius did not seat himself at the table when Raffaele set the watch upon it. He knelt before it and laid both arms upon the surface.

This portable timepiece was different. Lucius was acquainted with the elaborate pomander clocks that patricians wore suspended from a chain like thuribles. In his own stock he additionally carried the cylindrical box clocks. Both symbolised the progress of the Renaissance, in which one no longer needed to read the time from bell towers or town hall clocks, but instead carried time upon one’s person. The individual was no longer dependent upon his surroundings. He commanded time at will.

Even if time proved cumbersome in practice. The box clocks and pomander clocks were unwieldy. Their weight made itself felt after several hours. One set them upon a table at the first opportunity.

The Tesino watch differed from every other clock that Lucius had ever seen — and would ever see in the future. It was not even as large as a fist. Its form was oval, resembling a compressed cylinder, no more than a quarter the height of the box clocks he offered in the shop. The upper surface was dominated by a pattern of ornaments and lozenges reminiscent of a compass rose.

On the underside, a lily flashed in the candlelight. The engraving was precisely the same as that which Raffaele wore at his lapel.

“You will permit me?”

Raffaele had not yet answered when Lucius pushed himself back from the table and wrenched open the drawer of a wall cupboard. A magnifying glass glinted from the far side of the room, accompanied by a pair of tweezers. With a tender touch, the clockmaker clipped the masterpiece open.

“Southern German work.”

Lucius clicked his tongue as he did so. Through the glass, he examined the hour hand, which rested above a flickering brass sun. No fewer than two rings completed the clock face, one bearing Arabic numerals, one Roman. The twelve signs of the Zodiac occupied the space beneath them in miniature.

“Nuremberg, most probably,” said Lucius after a pause. “These ideas are characteristic of the Nuremberg ingenuity. Yet the artistry of the clock face might point to an Italian provenance.”

The client nodded with satisfaction. Lucius was telling him what Raffaele already knew.

“You know your craft.”

“My father studied under Peter Henlein.”

Raffaele started.

“The master of masters?”

“Is there another Peter Henlein?”

Lucius allowed himself a broad grin. He had removed the glass from his eye and regarded the client with a winning expression. This statement was Lucius’s calling card.

By this point at the latest, Raffaele found himself confirmed in his judgement. Henlein was not merely any clockmaker. He was the clockmaker. Henlein had not built pocket watches — he had invented the pocket watch.

And Lucius Horologius was therefore the perfect man for this task. Perhaps the only man.

A faint, metallic sound roused the exile from his dreams of hope.

“What is that?”

The clockmaker tapped the tweezers against a rectangular field beneath the noon position. Within it rested another numeral. Lucius pressed his precision instrument against it and detected a rotating mechanism.

“A date display. Ingenious.”

The Horologius stood open-mouthed — not in disbelief, but from the sensation of a childlike joy that some master craftsman had succeeded in incorporating a daily rhythm alongside the hourly one. Many had failed in the attempt to attach a minute hand, for the bodily movements and jolts of the daily perambulation gave rise to inaccuracies. But to insert a change of day every twenty-four hours — no one had hit upon that before!

The clockmaker jerked his head upward and looked towards the Tesino.

“What else did your father know about this clock?”

Impatience lay in his voice. Raffaele breathed out audibly.

“Even if I wished to — I could no longer ask him.”

“A family dispute?” Lucius surmised.

“Execution by Austrian occupying forces,” Raffaele corrected, with a smile that passed into a baring of teeth.

Lucius lowered his head.

“My condolences.”

“His death was ten years ago to the day. Do not trouble yourself.”

“And in ten years you have had the watch placed before no master craftsman?”

“I found it only a few months ago amongst his estate. Unfortunately Palatina had no clockmaker who might have been able to repair it.”

Raffaele tapped the clock face.

“Can you set it going again?”

Lucius tapped the hour hand with the tweezers. Although it was long since evening, and Raffaele had entered the room shortly after seven, the clock was still showing two o’clock. And yet from within came a melodious ticking.

“Strange, that. The clock has undoubtedly stopped …”

“… and yet the ticking still sounds,” Raffaele completed. “It is a mystery.”

The clockmaker lifted the masterpiece, held it to his right ear as though to assure himself that in the concert of table, longcase, and pocket clocks he was not confusing the sound with that of another device. But the warm sound of the Tesino watch was unmistakeable. He would have known it amongst a thousand — though he had been acquainted with it for only a few minutes.

It was a warm, pleasant ticking. One that flattered the ear. Not so deep that it lay upon one’s hearing like a bass note. Nor so bright that it set one’s nerves on edge after too long a time. Instead: pure melody. A lilting song. A lay.

“Ser Horologius?”

Lucius was obliged to set the Tesino watch down so as not to lose himself in its harmonics. Raffaele looked displeased.

“Allora,” he began. “How long do you think the repair will take you?”

“A fortnight.”

“I give you one week.”

Raffaele was a nobleman. One was obliged to display certain affectations and particular requirements, lest the craftsmen forget with whom they were dealing. At any rate, that was how Lucius interpreted the imperious behaviour.

“The festival week is at the door. I hardly think I shall manage to complete your commission amidst all the commotion.”

“Then you will work during the festival week.”

“On New Year’s Eve, not even the members of the assassins’ guild work.”

Lucius was a craftsman. One must always point out that one could never complete anything within the stated time, lest the customers forget how fortunate they were to be negotiating with the only master of his trade. At any rate, that was how the nobleman interpreted the dismissive behaviour.

“But you said you sold time.”

A purse struck the table. Before Lucius had understood what was happening, coins spilled from its opening and rolled against the Tesino watch.

“I should like to purchase some,” Raffaele continued. “The whole stock you have remaining, preferably.”

The clockmaker looked into the demanding eyes of the customer. Then at the lire and ducats glinting in the candlelight. Silver ermines tumbled amongst the scattered golden portraits of the Doges of Palatina. Three years’ wages of an ordinary working man covered the table top of the Horologius.

Raffaele thought he could purchase him. But Lucius had no need of money. What mattered more was what he desired. In this moment, that was neither dead Doges nor lire coins bearing the ermine motif — but the ticking of that watch, which called out to him.

“Agreed. You are fortunate that I am a clockmaker, and not an assassin.”

The Englishman extended his hand to the Tesino in a friendly manner. Raffaele smiled in the manner of someone acknowledging a poor joke but nonetheless showing amusement, not wishing to abandon a transaction still in progress. With an air of studied cordiality he returned the question:

“Because you are working overtime for me?”

“No,” answered Lucius with a cunning look, “but because otherwise I should have to kill you.”

The smile froze upon Raffaele’s face, and he swallowed it down. The clockmaker was not looking at him, but stared as though hypnotised at the Tesino watch, whose compass rose motif glinted in his eyes.

“This clock is worth committing murder for.”

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A funeral procession marched through the streets. In a small town on the Montenegrin coast, where gray stone buildings nestled against the shores of the Bay of Kotor, the death knell rang from a campanile. The inhabitants wore their finest garments. Naval officers and guardsmen accompanied the cortège. They moved through streets where on this day no laughter, no weeping, no voice resounded.

Captain Viscovich led them, wearing his dress uniform.

Again the death knell tolled. In the sunlight, the golden winged lion gleamed. Six men, three on each side, had unfurled it. They formed the center of this procession. Under the last tolling of the bells of Perast, they entered the church. Viscovich looked up at the campanile, where the bell swung back. A campanile that recalled the Venetian original on St. Mark’s Square.

Venice lay hundreds of miles away. Occupied by Napoleon’s French, who had forced the Doge to abdicate. Who had proclaimed the end of the Republic and burned the Golden Book with the great families. The red banner with the golden lion had been torn to shreds. The Arsenal closed, the ships within destroyed. The Doge’s state barge smashed to recover the gold leaf. The revolutionaries had plundered paintings, even had ceiling frescoes torn from the Doge’s Palace.

Venice had fallen. But not San Marco. San Marco, the saint who had given identity to a few unbending lagoon dwellers. A nameless lagoon people he had made great. For a thousand years. Wherever the lion’s banner waved, there San Marco lived, there Venice endured. Therefore the French burned everything that recalled him. They struck the lions from the marble, they tore the banners, they destroyed the ships on which he appeared.

And Giuseppe Viscovich knew it would not be long before the troops reached his small city as well. His spies reported it. The Croatians in Zara had resisted. In Šibenik, the new governor had been murdered. Along the Dalmatian coast, they would not abandon San Marco—which was why the inhabitants were humiliated and punished all the more harshly.

But Viscovich would not grant the revolutionaries this triumph—those who cut the sacred banner of Mark into cloth, sold it, and hoisted instead the godless tricolor that spoke of human rights while demanding human lives.

The choirs rang out, calling to Mass. The Schiavoni, the Slavic elite fighters of the Republic, drew their broad swords and saluted the banner. From outside, Venetian artillery sounded one last time. The city elders bowed their heads, and the women brought their sons and daughters, who carried the red cloth toward the altar. Perast was one of Venice’s beloved daughters: located far away in the land of the Dalmatians, where the Venetian accent was unknown. And yet the people were as faithfully devoted to the gonfalon, the banner of the Republic, as the fishermen of Malamocco or the salt workers of Chioggia.

A Venetian was a Venetian when he honored San Marco. With San Marco it had begun, with San Marco it would end. Venice knew no king, and the Doge was merely a representative of the Evangelist. Venice was not a godless republic. It was the republic of a saint. The republic of a winged lion. A mythical creature from the primordial times of Christianity, incarnate in San Marco and through San Marco. A heavenly beast of God that kept company with the Cherubim and supported the throne of God.

What were the three colors of the tricolor against this symbol of Christianity itself?

At last the procession halted before the altar. The Captain positioned himself at the gonfalon. Perast had received this banner as a daughter of San Marco. Three hundred seventy-seven years ago, when the small city sent aid to Venice, and the Perastines sailed forth on their ships. At the Battle of Lepanto too, the Perastines had suffered terrible losses to stand by the Serenissima in battle against the Turks. The Perastines loved the Republic, they loved Venice, and they loved San Marco no less than any other Venetian patriots.

And Viscovich moved his lips, mindful of this day, August 23, 1797, when they laid this symbol to rest like a relative, like a friend, like a spouse lost through a terrible stroke of fate after accompanying one through a lifetime.

“In this bitter moment that weighs upon our hearts; in this final outburst, this final surge of our love for our Serenissima and our Republic; in this act, as we lay the gonfalon of San Marco to rest—this, my friends, shall not be a consoling event, but one of duty and our courage, after we guarded it for centuries.

Europe shall know that Perast remained faithful to Venice until the last moment. It shall know that we protected this beloved gonfalon to our last breath. It shall know that we buried it with all honors and amid tears of pain and love. Tell your children, so that one day all Europe knows what transpired here today.

And let us proclaim to all how we and all Perast hoped, believed, and loved in the service of our beloved Republic; how we fought with the lion at our side, how we failed, how we triumphed.

For 377 years our fidelity and faith protected your banner; on land and at sea; against rivals and the enemies of Christendom.

For 377 years we gave everything we possessed to you alone, San Marco! We sacrificed our blood and our bodies and our lives for you! And we did it with love; with joy; with gladness!

You with us, we with you. With you we were on the sea—ever glorious, valiant, and sublime! No one can ever claim we had to flee with you! No one was afraid when we fought with you at our side!

And even though we see you defeated, expelled from Italy and dishonored by your own, our blood, our souls, our love, and our fidelity still belong to you. But since we can do nothing more for you than bury you honorably, we will do it with the same love with which we honored you before.

Your eulogy shall be the greatest and purest. Your eulogy shall be our tears!

You are with us, and we are with you, San Marco.”

“Nu co Ti, Ti co nu, San Marco,” Viscovich breathed at last—whereupon the Perastines went to the gonfalon, kissed and wept over the cloth, as women and men broke into lamentations and inconsolable grief. Never before and never since had a state received such a burial ceremony; and San Marco himself seemed present in those minutes as the last Venetians buried their saint beneath the altar to protect him from the hands of those who destroyed everything so dear to them.

And as the Perastines concealed the gonfalon, Viscovich knelt down to his nephew, who observed the ceremony with wide eyes:

“You too, kneel down, and remember everything you have seen, until the end of your life.”

The boy fell to the marble and spoke a prayer. On this day the republic, perhaps Venice, might die. But no one could kill a saint.

And as the wings of the lion disappeared beneath the Dalmatian stone, young Viscovich knew he might never see the gonfalon again—but that as long as love for San Marco endured and burned in the heart of one last Venetian, hope would never be extinguished, until the lion roared again and spread its wings.

What a thousand years had formed, no revolution could undo.

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“You don’t believe in God,” Italo stated. “Not because you’re an atheist. But because in your sober world of experience made up of probabilities, he would have very little place. And the niche he would occupy in your worldview would be far too small for you to attach omnipotence to this imaginary being.”

The American remained unimpressed.

“I tried Buddhism once.”

“That’s so clichéd...” the Italian rolled his eyes.

“Hey, it gave me more than Sunday school with the Methodists, at any rate.”

“You can hardly call that religion.”

“More clearly, Mr. Italo.”

“Do you have a Pope, Patriarch, or at least something comparable?”

Sam’s raised eyebrow answered the question sufficiently.

"But honestly," Italo said cynically, "how am I supposed to take such nonsense seriously?"

“Buddhism also has hardly any hierarchies.”

“The only good thing about Buddhism is the belief in reincarnation.”

The American thought she’d misheard. She looked at Italo skeptically.

“Really?”

“Of course. Best of all, naturally, as an Italian, Roman Catholic.”

Sam ran her fingers across her forehead, remaining in a tone of mockery and irony.

“Forgive my non-existent entry in the Catholic baptismal register.”

“Nobody is perfect, Miss Farmer.”

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Sam directed her thoughtful gaze at the half-empty plate.

“People like you must have lost faith in God...”

“People like me,” Italo emphasized, “must believe in God and the saints. The abominable cannot exist without the miraculous.”

She raised her head again. The conversation was taking a peculiar direction.

“You’re speaking of the Devil,” Sam understood.

“An inconceivable thought for you, naturally.”

“I believe in neither one nor the other.”

“Then beware of Satan. His greatest deception is to make the world believe he doesn’t exist,” Italo was convinced. “That’s why he’s been more present in this century than in any other.”

“How can you be so educated and simultaneously so irrational?”

“Counter-question: are you certain that your faith in human reason isn’t ultimately just one belief among many?”

Sam was dumbfounded. He was questioning self-evident truths. It was an irrefutable basic concept that reason was better than superstition. That explained itself. Anyone who had been through a normal school education knew that. Anything else would be a regression into the Middle Ages.

“You come from a world of unreason.”

“Very well observed.”

Sam had meant to sound reproachful—but Italo had taken it not as a provocation, but as her sober perception. Possibly he couldn’t have expressed it better himself.

He took no offense whatsoever at this assessment. Italo regarded it as a compliment.

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‘So, Mr Italo, how do you like social media?’

‘Anti-social media would be more accurate.’

‘Didn’t you drink your morning chocolate again?’

Sam grinned, as if provoking him.

‘On the contrary. I’m already on my fourth cup,’ Italo whispered. ‘Otherwise, it’s all unbearable.’

‘You’ve only been online for half an hour.’

‘Tell me why complete strangers want to be friends with me. I don’t even want that in real life.’

‘Someone seems to appreciate your Caravaggio.’

‘It’s typical of this decadent century that people think they can do Caravaggio justice with 140 characters or a “thumbs up”.’

‘Like.’

Sam’s decidedly friendly tone lingered. For a few moments, Italo just looked at the American woman reproachfully.

‘You Yankees don’t give a damn whether you “like” a Starbucks cup or a Caravaggio. Santo Dio. There’s only one thing that pisses me off more.’

‘Which is?’

‘Clichés,’ Italo emphasised. ‘Clichés everywhere.’

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“Bao... has won.”

On the horizon, the red sails vanished. The gangs had cast them out. On an island that appeared on no map, because it wasn’t allowed to exist. A state secret that the officials of Cathay guarded in the most inaccessible shelves of their giant library—and their expedition, Laura knew, would become part of this state secret. They would bury her failure beneath two hundred and ninety-nine stacks of paper. Just as no trace of Marco Polo remained in the imperial archive, no record told of the escort to Persia.

The bitter irony lay on her lips. She had followed Messer Milion. And she ended like him. As an erased footnote of history. In five hundred years, they would dismiss her journey as pure invention. Just as little as the islands of Sondur and Condur had existed—fantasies of a Venetian storyteller!—just as little had she herself existed.

Laura sank down. Her knees dug into the sand. Her body had become so heavy that she believed she was sinking down through the grains of sand into the depths, because there was no rock to give her hold.

Beside her, the sea washed shells onto the beach.

A leather boot stepped into the water.

“A Venetian would rather go ten thousand miles than sink down once,” said the Memmo.

He didn’t extend his hand to her. His words raised her up—if only out of shame at her own weakness. The Memmo drew his authority from a reach into her memories. Standing still meant death. Whoever didn’t move neither reached the destination nor home.

As long as he lived, he would be restless.

And it was this restlessness that made her breathe again too.

“There’s no drinking water on this island,” she said.

“Then we’ll just have to leave the island.”

Laura blinked.

“With the crew of two ships?”

She gestured toward the Chinese sailors. The scattered Vietnamese pirates. The third Venetian, who meticulously shifted a bead on an abacus, calculating how much the marooning on the island was costing him. The imperial official sitting on a crate, tea bowl in hand, angrily cursing in the direction of the departing ships, complaining about the absence of a tea ceremony.

But the Memmo didn’t seem to care. Laura searched his face for doubt—but found none.

The wind rustled through her father’s full beard.

“Can you imagine,” he began, “if Zheng He had rounded the Cape of Good Hope like Bartolomeu Dias?”

Laura raised her eyebrow skeptically.

“Dias died doing it.”

The Memmo laughed.

“Exactly why! The imperial court would have examined the expedition closely. Calculated. Weighed. They would have created a committee to explore the sense and benefit. They would have read all the writings of the empire to pass judgment, considered every detail, and made wiser and more long-term decisions—because rounding Africa would have been so daring and mad that they would have forbidden any attempt by law.”

“You think the Chinese would have decided against it?“, Laura asked. “Why would they have done that?”

“Because the Middle Kingdom has everything it needs. We Europeans are the ones who need China—not the other way around.”

He tramped through the sand. Ignored the chaos the marooned men were creating. Laura’s father was not a man of details. His gaze went over the palm crowns, up to the mountain.

The gigantic ship covered in green vines towered over them. The seven and a half masts jutted into the gray sky.

“What fragile little nutshells the Portuguese naus are against these mighty junks of old, Laura! If we didn’t have this restless spirit, we would have no right to exist in this world.”

Laura tried to follow—in step as in spirit. She didn’t know where he was heading. She heard his voice vibrate. It was a vibrato she knew would plunge her into trouble again. He was forging ahead, in a direction no one but him anticipated.

Back in Venice, as a child, this tone of voice had imprinted itself in her inner ear. It was the tone that sounded among Venetian merchants when they spoke of gold; a fever, a euphoric, overflowing, intoxicating fever lay in their throats. It was the fever of pure will to live.

Marco Polo fever.

The Memmo smiled.

“Only as long as we attempt the impossible will we continue to exist.”

And it dawned on Laura Memmo that her father had lost his mind.

“You want to get a hundred-year-old junk on a mountain seaworthy again?”

“We pulled a galley fleet over the mountains of Lake Garda—a junk more or less doesn’t make much difference either.”

“We don’t have enough men to pull it down.”

“I know. I’ve already thought about that.”

“And?”

“We’ll build a ramp and then push the junk down.”

“You’re mad.”

“And you’re the daughter of a madman,” said the Memmo. “Let’s do the impossible.”

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“And what is your contribution to saving Western civilization, Mr. Italo?” Sam followed up mockingly.

“Every second I breathe, I do nothing else, Miss Farmer.”

“I can hardly imagine you led a crusading enterprise this morning.”

“You’re mistaken. I was at the beverage store.”

“I see.”

“With Beethoven’s 7th Symphony at full volume. Probably gave a group of startled migrant children a little culture lesson in the process. Always happy to help.”

The Italian continued unperturbed.

“Afterwards I drove to the bakery. Not without driving through one of those Seljuk neighborhoods.”

“Still Beethoven?”

“Tchaikovsky. The finale from Swan Lake.”

“Was that it?”

“Was still at the car wash. Belonged to some Berlin Kurds. But I’m optimistic that the Coriolan resounded through the entire hall.”

The American raised an eyebrow.

“You have a peculiar notion of the clash of civilizations.”

“Beethoven said: ‘My music is for everyone.’ I’m just putting his legacy into practice.”

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“I thought you couldn’t stand Impressionism?”

Italo said nothing. Sam persisted.

“You claimed that kindergarteners with finger paints could produce something similar.”

“Indeed,” the Italian confirmed.

“And didn’t you just recently get all worked up about how the thousandth copy of a Monet water lily shows a lack of mental capacity?”

“Yes.”

“And—please correct me if I’m wrong—wasn’t it also YOU who claimed that even the ape Congo painted more colorful pictures?”

“Hmhm.”

Italo didn’t look at her. He gazed ahead into the gallery with the paintings.

“So what are we actually doing here?”

“Studies, Miss Farmer.”

Sam looked in the same direction. She twisted her mouth.

“Could it be that you’re not here for the art at all, but for the female art students?”

“Do you expect an honest answer to that from an Italian?”

Sam’s tongue took on the sharpness of a foil.

“Are those the perks of being an art historian?”

“It at least marginally makes up for the embarrassing salary,” Italo remarked dryly.

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Call me reactionary, but I simply never understand why people destroy things and then claim it’s art.

It’s anti-art.

For if the good is beautiful and the beautiful is good, then the destruction of either is evil.

Yes, I’m convinced that art must also shake people up. Art that doesn’t make you think is propaganda.

But if you only attract attention through “negative” emotions, then that’s merely effect, first and foremost.

If I smash an egg on a Caravaggio, for instance, that’s an assault, not art.

What art lacks today is the purifying effect, the catharsis.

This needn’t be some highbrow affair. I also watch “Back to the Future” and feel good afterwards. The story is resolved.

The inability to enable catharsis is the misery of contemporary art.

Because artists are no longer capable of “triggering” or “purifying” something in the reader or viewer, only the resort to effect remains.

It’s so much easier to feel bad or to ensure that one feels bad than for things to go well.

Artists have wrestled for millennia with the fact that everything has already been done. What is truly original?

The solution in art lay in this: Every generation rediscovers a subject matter, engages with it, interprets it.

Art lives from art: We suddenly see something that we—or our ancestors—didn’t see before.

The problem of the present seems to be that it can do nothing with the treasure of art; that its rupture is inevitable and total.

When you can’t create anything beautiful, nothing to make life better, then only provocation, parody and perversion remain.

And that unfortunately applies to a great deal of what constitutes our cultural world at present.

In the awareness of being unable to create anything, everything becomes merely a foil to somehow draw attention to oneself.

For when art no longer aims to leave something for the future independent of time, something that provides answers and contains hidden things still to be discovered, only noise remains.

And when nothing works anymore, you simply make politics and propaganda with art, only to move on to the next project, which is then just as quickly forgotten.

For their own 15 minutes of fame, such destructive artists are also willing to topple the monuments of the past. Self-aggrandizement and desperation both play a role. Why respect a myth of the past when its violation at least provides the attention one desires?

Wonders of the world have been destroyed in order to go down in history as the destroyer of these wonders. That too is a form of artistic understanding. The question is no longer how one moves one’s fellow human beings; but that one moves them.

This destruction, sometimes vandalistic, sometimes deconstructive, is simultaneously a confession: When you can only exist by dragging what exists through the dirt, the impression remains that you can only exist by ridding yourself of the past.

For nothing new is created. Everything that this form of effect-art assumes with political, ideological, nihilistic or destructive hues is as ancient as it is boring. Innovation doesn’t emerge in a vacuum.

But a vacuum is what these artists leave behind.

I'm not sure if I'm an artist. But I've always wanted to create something beautiful.

Not because I believe I can.

But because I believe that's the only thing that makes sense to do.

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No one reads anymore. All the stranger, then, that I’ve started a Substack—on top of that, in English. So why “Mr. Italo”?

First of all: my own website has not been publicly accessible for several years now. The reasons why I can’t restore it are tedious to list. I started the “Löwenblog” (Lion’s blog) at the end of 2013 and ran it intensively from 2015 to about 2019. In the last two years (2020/2021) of its existence, I mostly shared links—to my articles that appeared elsewhere.

Background: by then I was receiving so many requests from German-language media that I simply no longer had the time to write something “for myself.” I could write my pieces for outlets with a much larger reach—and even get paid for it. The “Löwenblog” was always free. At the same time, it helped me decisively to become an established voice within the German conservative, christian, alternative media spectrum.

That, by the way, is one reason why this site is completely free. I write whatever I want here. Anyone who’s interested is invited. Back then I didn’t chase an audience; I simply listened to my own stubbornness. I don’t care for how-to guides. Twenty-three loyal fans matter more to me than 20,000 amorphous beings. Giovannino Guareschi, too, would ironically speak of his 23 readers, from whom his entire audience supposedly consisted.

Since the word “how-to guide” has come up: this brings us full circle to the claim that no one reads anymore. My impression is that this coach bubble has become a self-sustaining business for a certain middle tier—qualitatively better than the bottom feeders, yet never quite breaking into the top league. There are countless YouTube accounts, for instance, about writing. Everyone wants to write, but hardly anyone can. By now there is an almost incestuous industry in which guide-writers and scribblers are trapped together in a closed room.

Since you can no longer make money from writing, you write about writing. Or you talk about it. Which should already give pause: for most of us who still believe people are attached to the written word, the audiovisual train has left the station. Media consumption has become more specialized and shifted. Traditional radio, for example, is dead. Yet people listen nonstop to podcasts—some of them hours long, a duration once considered unbearable. In the end, it’s audio text—stuff one used to read.

Accordingly, my aim is not to produce regular new content, but to preserve what I can preserve. That includes numerous texts from the “Löwenblog” years, which I would like to conserve here. Some I’ve professionalized and improved (honestly, some of the pieces are ten years old!). Of course, everything also suffers in translation. But this much I can guarantee: everything you read here is handwritten. My texts may be embarrassing—but nothing is more embarrassing than an AI text that gives itself away. I’d rather be honest.

In this sense, “Mr. Italo” is indeed the spiritual successor to the “Löwenblog,” which for me began as a mere text archive. The eponymous Italo will, of course, also appear here and serve as the patron of this online presence. The program is the same as back then: Art, History, Venice, Italy–Germany, Guareschi, Catholicism, and reactionary commentary on the day.

Texts will appear on Thursdays and Sundays starting next week.

Perhaps someone reading along would like to be my 24th reader.

Saluti

Marco

P.S.: The fact that I’ve broken my own rule by writing something new in the form of this post gives me pause as well.

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