“It’s incredibly frustrating. Wherever I am, I never have access to all the books I need,” he said, swallowing his wine and putting the cup down. “Here I have all the Christian books, even those that will be destroyed when Julius gets here in November, but not the ones we rescued from Alexandria. My memory’s good, but it’s so useful to be able to check things.”

“Are you done with the ones here?” I asked.

He nodded. “But I wish there were somewhere we could have everything.”

We walked together through the streets. Bologna is a remarkably medieval city. It was a provincial nowhere as Roman Bononia, and thrived in the Middle Ages; but in my opinion, while the food is usually good, it was never really beautiful until the renewal of the periphique in the twenty-second century. True, it had pillars and colonnades, but as we walked in their shade I couldn’t help noticing that all the pillars were different. There was no harmony, no true proportion. Nothing matched. It was all a medieval jumble. Occasionally I noticed a lovely classical pillar, and felt an urge to rescue it and put it somewhere it could be comfortable.

“You’re not so angry now?” Pico asked.

“I’m not unjustly taking out my anger on the wrong person,” I said. “When I find Athene will be soon enough to indulge my wrath.”

“You really did look like an avenging angel, with your cloak flaring around you like that,” he said.

In Pico’s New Concordance, Olympian gods are classed as angels. I think of it as a metaphor. I had changed the appearance of my clothes to be locally inconspicuous. Everyone’s cloak flared in 1506. But there was no point in arguing.

*   *   *

There’s nothing wrong with brick, brick can be beautiful, but it can easily be overdone. The church and monastery of St. Stephen was a mess. It contained different sections built at different times. It had been owned by a number of different orders, and they had all built onto it, none of them completing the designs of their predecessors. It was like a chambered nautilus where each chamber had been designed by a different committee. “It’s as if the Renaissance had never happened,” I murmured to Pico as we passed through a room containing an enormous pulpit in the shape of the Holy Sepulchre, with scarcely room for two people to pass by around it. It would have done well enough in a correspondingly huge and Gothic nave, here it was ridiculous and unserviceable, almost intimidating in its size and impracticality.

“The Renaissance is thriving right now in Florence and Rome,” he said with a sideways smile. “It’ll make it here eventually. I hope.”