That idea might have served as a good lead into my article: "Tadema — Under the Volcano." But the exhibition was closed. At first, we didn't understand and assumed the cord dividing the hall — one-half of which was devoted to various painters of vedute set in antiquity and the other half to Tadema — was a precautionary measure to protect the paintings. Once we realised our mistake, we presented our tickets for the special exhibition. But the uniformed women and men sitting beside the barrier turned away. "Chiuso, chiuso!" cried the one seated closest, and without so much as a glance at our tickets.

"I've paid," I said, "and now I want to see the other side of the hall." They were silent. "I'm going to write about it, that's really in your own interest." No response. Only when I reached out to remove the cord did these ladies and gentlemen awake from their stupor. One signore grabbed me by the arm. He was trying hard to keep his voice down. Natalia translated. Unemployed workers had barricaded themselves on that balcony up ahead, where they had unrolled their banners. No one knew how they would react if anyone got too close, the police had been notified, we would have to wait. "How long?" I asked. "Just a few hours," came the answer, then he let go of me.

I didn't know what to do. The uniformed guards realised at once that I had capitulated and returned to their seats. "Then I can't write about it," I said. "Then you're free to go," Natalia said.

For my reading that evening we entered a side street off the Piazza San Domenico Maggiore and then descended a set of stairs into an artist's studio. Camilla Miglio, a professor at the L'Orientale, introduced me. The audience consisted almost exclusively of female students, most of them barely over twenty. I kept staring up at the window that looked to the piazza. Last year, we were told, when Terezia Mora had given a reading here, they had come close to having to shut down because of the sirens and shouts and the blue lights of police cars. The son of a Mafia boss had been shot dead very close by.

On our return to the hotel, we were greeted with a shock. The girls were sleeping, Ralf lay stretched diagonally across our bed, an empty bottle of red wine with its cork pressed down inside was on the little table by the window, plus a saucer full of cigarette butts, and beside it a stack of orange peels. It took Ralf a while to come to himself. At first, he didn't understand why we were whispering.

According to him, he had been drinking again for a good while, but in moderation, only in moderation, he said, no harm in that. That was beside the point, Natalia said, whether in moderation or not, and a whole bottle was not necessarily moderation. Why was he drinking in secret, I asked. But he wasn't being secretive about it. He hadn't drunk anything in our company, I replied. "You two don't drink," Ralf said. "On your account," I said.

I found his red-wine breath insufferable. I just wanted him out of the room quickly. The next morning, Ralf joined us at the breakfast table in a sunny mood. If we didn't mind, he'd like to accompany us to Pompeii. Natalia went on with her story about the dogs there and how they had chased my mother in the summer of 2001. At the exit, she had turned around without a second thought and opened a bottle of water she'd bought from a street vendor, then poured the water into the cup of her hand, so that the dogs could drink. Ralf said that without the eruption, Pompeii would be a totally insignificant town nowadays, having at best an old church with walls decked out in provincial baroque, a phrase taken verbatim from his guidebook.