With this thought giving me the confidence I needed, I turned through the large, open wrought-iron gates into the drive. And for the first time, I laid eyes on the house where the coordinates had told me my story had originally begun.

It was an elegant eighteenth-century mansion, its formal square shape and white stuccoed walls, with their intricate plaster corbels and mouldings, redolent of Brazil’s colonial past. Yet as I drew nearer, I could see the stucco was shabby and cracked and the paintwork on the dozens of tall casement windows had peeled away in many places to reveal bare wood.

Garnering my courage, I walked towards it, passing around the base of a carved marble fountain, where rivulets of water must once have played. I saw that most of the shutters on the windows were tightly closed and began to wonder whether Pietro was right and that this house was no longer occupied.

Walking up the wide set of steps to the front door, I pressed the antiquated bell. But it elicited no sound from within. After trying it twice more, I knocked on the door as confidently as I dared. I waited for a response, but there was no sound of footsteps inside. I decided to knock again more loudly.

Having now stood on the doorstep for a good few minutes, I realised it was fruitless and that no one would be answering the door. Looking upwards, and again noting the closed shutters across the windows of the rooms above, I deduced the house was probably not lived in.

I descended the steps, deciding whether to walk straight back down the drive to Pietro and forget the whole idea, or whether to have a prowl around to see if I could at least see through a crack in one of the shutters. Deciding eventually on the latter, I crept around the side of the house.

I realised that it was far longer than it was wide, the side wall of the house stretching towards what I could see had once been a beautiful garden. I kept walking along its length, disappointed to find no visible peephole through which I could spy. As I reached the far end of the wall, it brought me on to a moss-covered terrace.

My eye was immediately caught by a stone sculpture of a young woman in the far corner of it, amidst some cracked terracotta plant pots. She was in a sitting position, staring straight ahead. And even though as I approached I saw the nose was chipped, the clean, simple lines of the woman were starkly beautiful.

I was about to turn to survey the back of the house when I noticed a figure sitting under a tree in the garden below the terrace.

My heart began to pound in my ears as I shrank back against the wall out of sight and peered round the corner to study the figure. From this distance, it was hard to form an exact physical description; all I could tell was that she was female and, from the way she sat in the chair, very elderly.