The department’s secretary had emailed me a few days before my arrival: there would be a delay to my start date, he informed me, as the outgoing postholder (still living in the accommodation I was due to take) had had to postpone their departure for personal reasons. I wasn’t to worry, he wrote: they had reserved me a room at L’hotel Delle Cento Storie, a few hundred metres from the station—they would do everything they could to hasten the handover of both the role and the apartment and, in the meantime, I was free to use the time to explore and familiarise myself with the city.
The hotel was an unassuming building, set down a narrow side street in an area of the city where the old town met the docklands. At the reception desk, the proprietor could not, initially, find a record of my reservation, but was happy for me to wait in the lobby while he checked his records and made a few calls. He prepared me an aperitif from the bar area at the far end of the room, and gestured to the bookshelves which lined the lobby walls. ‘Be my guest,’ he said, ‘I’m sure the matter won’t take long to resolve.’
A Personal Anthology 