Sitting there, though, I realized that their classes were much more pronounced than ours. There’s a thing people say, that you can tell somebody is gold without checking their cloak pin. It means they are truly excellent, so much so that their quality really shows. People used to say it about my parents. In Marissa, you really could tell, but not because of shining excellence. The people talking to Ficino were all golds, and they were all free to sit drinking wine in the middle of the afternoon. They were cleaner and somehow glossier than the people working around us. I watched a man carrying a sack and a woman buying vegetables. Both of them wore bronze pins. Their kitons were shabbier, more faded, frayed at the edges. Of course, there are always people who let their clothes fall into disrepair. But this wasn’t a case of sloppy individuals or personal idiosyncrasy. The people sitting with us all had more embroidery on their kitons, and while none of them were fat they tended to be a little plumper than the others. I thought back to the feast the night before. Had everyone inside the hall been a gold? I thought perhaps they had. This visible class difference was nothing like the poverty in the Kyklades. But it was strange to me.

Just then a woman came up to our table with a pitcher. Because I’d been thinking about it I noticed that she was wearing a bronze pin, of the same design we used at home. I also saw that there was something odd about her attitude. She seemed somehow lacking in confidence. She refilled our wine cups, deferentially, and one of the men paid her—paid her with a coin. I had read about money, but not seen it before. I tried not to gape.

After a while, I persuaded Ficino to walk through the city with me. As we walked I drew him around to the subject of the verses he’d recited to Phaedrus. He repeated them to me patiently, they were by Petrarka on the subject of someone thinking about how people in future ages were deprived by not being able to see a woman called Laura. He then translated them into Latin for me. I had understood them perfectly. So, clearly my divine language ability worked on all languages. It seemed as if there would be places it would be more useful than on Kallisti, where everyone spoke Greek and Latin and nobody spoke anything else, but it still seemed like a fun ability. I wondered whether Father could do it. I wondered whether I could speak the other languages or only understand them. That would be hard to test without giving myself away, but maybe I could try it with Father.

“Why are you and Phaedrus suddenly interested in Italian poetry?” Ficino asked.