I would later come to learn the history of L’Hotel Delle Cento Storie—a chance encounter with a kitchen hand who worked at the trattoria on the same street. In part through boredom and in part through nerves, I had taken to smoking again (a habit I thought I had left behind); there was a small alcove further down the street, shaded from the sun, where the kitchen hand would also take his breaks.

He was an old man, with calloused hands and a stooped back—he had worked at the trattoria for more than thirty years, he told me. He gestured towards the façade of the hotel. When he had first moved to the city from a nearby village, the hotel had been no more than a large guesthouse—seven storeys high, yes, but no wider or deeper than any of the other buildings down the street. A new owner, though, had acquired the two houses on either side, and later, two of the buildings on the street behind. Later, an adjacent courtyard was bought up, and another section of the hotel was built.

The hotel was run successfully for a number of years, the kitchen hand told me, before—perhaps twenty years ago—it was taken on by a wealthy English businessman who had made his money in publishing (perhaps as a new venture, the kitchen hand speculated, or perhaps a pet project). What had captured this businessman’s imagination, though, was the unique layout of the building: of all the buildings that had been acquired and added to the original guesthouse, not one had ceilings that matched the height of the others—the floors between each building were, as such, staggered at different levels, leading to a network of small staircases between the doorways which had been knocked through each wall—and in some cases, at the points where three or more of the original buildings met, further staircases would come off these staircases to link the floors to each other.

The kitchen hand slapped me on the shoulder, and held onto my arm: ‘It was never meant to be named L’Hotel Delle Cento Storie, you see! The Englishman had been completely taken by the building’s one hundred or so storeys—the floors between floors, the floors between those—but whether through haste, misunderstanding, or careless spelling, the copy that he sent to his translator read one hundred stories!’

‘But why, then, the library of so many books, of so many stories?’ I asked. The kitchen hand finished his cigarette, and threw the butt on the floor: ‘Some say coincidence, some say determinism,’ he replied. ‘I always say that if you write tobacconist above the door, you end up with little choice but to stock tobacco.’

I asked where I might find the Englishman. ‘I’m afraid you won’t,’ said the kitchen hand. ‘All his business interests were built off the back of his publishing, and there are only so many deaths of the novel a publisher can survive. What had happened, as I understand, was that the final straw was a substantial advance paid for a novel never received—the pages, it is rumoured, were thrown to the wind, the author never seen again. The Englishman’s businesses, I heard, collapsed one by one, themselves consigned to the winds of change. The hotel then stood empty for years—a hundred storeys, lost to a story that never existed.’

Published in I volatili del Beato Angelico, Sellerio, 1987, and in English in Vanishing Point, Vintage, 1993