As I came down the staircase, I heard two students in front of me speaking the language. Quite incomprehensible. How lucky that my landlady had been born in Turin and was thus not a native speaker. While I was thinking this, I was joined by one of the girls from the class. She had a young, fresh face and light hair and eyes. I thought she might be another foreign student, but she greeted me in perfect Italian.

“Well, that opened the eyes, didn’t it?” she said. “In more ways than one. If my grandmother saw me now, she’d demand that I come straight home again.”

I smiled with her. “Where are you from? Not from Venice?” I asked.

“I’m from South Tyrol. Used to be Austrian, now part of Italy. We still speak German at home. I miss my mountains. How about you?”

“From England.”

“Madonna!” she exclaimed. “Are you not afraid of the war? Everything we hear says that Hitler intends to invade Poland, and when he does, England has to declare war.”

“England let them have Czechoslovakia. Perhaps they will come to terms over Poland,” I said.

She shook her head. “Don’t you understand? Poland is the excuse. Hitler wants to be pushed into a war. He wants to be the injured party. You know what he says: ‘Here I am, reclaiming German territory around Danzig, and these brutish English are trying to stop our people from reclaiming our historic birthright.’ And Russia will side with him, you know. And France will side with England, and pretty soon it will spread. Hitler wants the world. Stalin wants the world, too, and Mussolini just wants the Mediterranean. But who will stop them?”

“I suppose you are right. England will try to.”

She nodded, leaning closer to me. “I think it will be bad. I have seen what they are doing in Germany. Building so many tanks and machines of war. They have already taken Austria, which was the country of my grandparents.” She paused on the landing halfway down the stairs. “What will you do if the war happens? Will you go home?”

“I expect I’ll have to,” I said. “Although everyone says that Venice will be quite safe. Nobody would ever bomb such a thing of beauty.”

“I hope you are right,” she said. “But Italy will side with Germany. You’ll be called an enemy, won’t you?”

“I’ll face it when it happens,” I said. “Right now I want to enjoy every moment. In fact I—”

Leo was standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up at me with that cheeky smile on his face.

“Bondì ,” he said in Venetian before switching to English as students streamed past us out into the glaring sunlight. “So I have found you! I was in the neighbourhood, and I was feeling hungry, and I thought you might want to come to lunch with me.”