The building had been erected over the course of 18 months in 1872-73, right on the coast at the time. Today, a wide coastal highway separates the Stazione from the sea. The frescos were painted in the summer and autumn of 1873. They have been restored several times since then, most recently in the 1990s.

Although the girls began romping about almost immediately and could barely be kept under control, eliciting the immediate and repeated apologies to our guide we felt were her due, for me the frescos were both a discovery and a gift.

These frescos have been described many times, and I'm not about to compete with a Meier-Graefe or argue whether or not Marées was, as I believe, the most painterly German of his time. I admired the tension he created merely by the placement of figures and how his faces are a blend of the individual and the abstract. Nothing is more alien to his work than the theatrical gesture, the narrative episode, or the snapshot effect of a Tadema, who was only one year his senior. The individual frescos stand on their own and enhance each other. They emerge in relationships, each to each, but without telling a story. And of course I was also amazed by the concept behind the enterprise. The interplay of art and science — the room balances the large laboratory on the opposite side of the building and was originally conceived as a concert hall, which soon became a library — was augmented to a triad by the addition of the aquarium. It was intended both as a way to offset costs and popularise scientific knowledge. The exceptional part was that here in this space I felt the mood of panic enveloping me since Ralf's latest escapade ebbing away. I cannot say why this was so, but it wasn't that my mind was distracted. On the contrary, I saw Ralf everywhere. Not in any sense of similarity, even though the arbor trellis at the head of the room to the east, which Marées painted together with friends, reveals both their comity and antagonisms — which was also a pretty fair description of my, or our, relationship to Ralf. But that analogy wouldn't have been necessary. The seascape with oarsmen on the north wall, the fishermen with their nets at the rear of the room, or both frescos of orange groves between the high doors of the balcony opening onto the sea — each individual fresco would have done the job. Yes, I would be content even with a detail of the gull gliding just above the water behind the boat, or of the hand reaching for an orange. Marées could transform the everyday into art. That was my simple discovery. In his work a gull was both a gull and a messenger sent out over the waters. His oranges were oranges and at the same time the apples of the Hesperides and the forbidden fruit of Paradise. Each minute I stood among the frescos seemed to lend me strength. My eye moved between the groves of orange trees and out into the Gulf. I couldn't say whether what Ralf had done made any sense, maybe it was the wrong thing to do. I didn't even know if I ought to hope that he caught up with the silver car or lost it from view. My only wish was to see Ralf again as soon as possible. The rest would work itself out. Finally, we descended to the aquarium, where the odour wasn't nearly as penetrating as on our arrival, and came to a halt at the first basin, where a large octopus lay stretched inert across the stones.

The claim that his pose was that of someone in a chaise longue is not some after-the-fact invention of mine. Yes, in some way he reminded me of Tischbein's portrait of Goethe, because the massive head and trunk — it's difficult to exactly tell the two apart — was draped a little to the left, whereas it had extended all its arms to the right. I found it odd to see its suckers, more familiar to me from insalata di polpo or frutti di mare. Anna asked whether the octopus was alive. It did indeed look more like a splotch of algae. We would probably have soon moved on had it not been for Frau Groeben's commentary. She told us it had three hearts, plus blue blood. It was a creature of nobility, since if you compared its brain mass to its body weight, it was more highly developed than homo sapiens. "And in terms of elegance," she added with a twitch of one corner of her mouth, "it was in any case an evolutionary mistake for life ever to have left the water."

The tips of its tentacles began to display some movement, although I did wonder whether the animal itself or water currents were the origin of those gentle curlicues. But then there was no mistaking a wavelike motion that passed along the arms, growing stronger and stronger, like a motor slowly revving up. Although its tentacles were all wriggling in much the same way, they were anything but in synch. Didn't it seem incredible that the motions of this configuration should all belong to the same creature, were all an act of its will? Some of the tips were curling up, others unrolling, some lifted, others sank, some thrashed about a little, others hardly at all. The effect of this polymorphic and yet unified animation was hypnotic.