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The advantage of Italy is the number of sunlit hours it affords.
    Secondly, the streets are crowded in the daytime. Crowds are, I know it only too well, a superlative hiding place – yet not only for myself: there are those who would hide from me in order to watch me, to wonder at me, to try to assess what I am up to.
    I do not like crowds unless they are to my advantage. A crowd is to me as a tropical forest is to a leopard. It can be a habitat of great safety or great danger, depending on attitude, position, the innate senses. To move in crowds I have to be ever alert, ever cautious. After a while, a constant state of watchfulness becomes tiring. This is the time of most danger, when the attention is weakened. It is then the hunter bags his leopard.
    Thirdly, if someone were to wish to burgle the apartment, he would more likely do it under cover of day.
    The inaccessibility of the apartment would make a night intrusion awkward at least, highly dangerous at best. No burglar, not even an idiot of an amateur apprentice, would be prepared to scale roofs of loose pantiles, haul up a seven-metre ladder, swing it over an open space fifteen metres above ground, clamber precariously over it and all for a few baubles, a wristwatch or two and a TV set.
    No: any burglar would come by day, disguised as a meter-reader, census-counter, health official, building inspector. It would not be easy for him even then: he would have to gain entry through to the courtyard, bluff his way past the wily Signora Prasca, who has been a concierge since before the war and knows all the tricks, and open my apartment door. It is double-deadlocked with two Chubbs, and the timber is over an inch thick. I have lined the inner side of the door with seven-gauge steel plate.
    The ordinary burglar’s time would anyway be wasted. I wear my one wristwatch and, with no desire to vegetate before inane quizzes and Milanese housewives’ breasts, I have no television, only the compact-disc player and the transistor radio, which are not popular with the Italian Society of Fagins.
    The more intelligent burglar, however, is the one I fear. What he would steal from me is not material wealth. It is knowledge, a knowledge which could be fenced more readily than a filched brooch or a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. Not everyone wants a hot watch but the whole world wants information.
    Fourthly, I like the apartment during the day. The windows let in the breeze, the sun moves inexorably across the floor, disappears, starts in through the opposite windows. The pantiles click in the heat and lizards scuttle along the sills. Martins nest in the eaves to chirp and cheep through the hot day, diving into their mud bowls like acrobats, as if being swung on trajectories of invisible wires. The countryside moves through phases of light: the mists of dawn, the harsh bright early sunlight, the haze of midday and afternoon, the purpling wash to dusk, the first sparks of lights coming on in the mountain villages.
    There is a romantic side to me. I do not deny it. With my concern for intricacy, my adoration of exactitudes, my perception of detail and my awareness of nature, I should perhaps have been a poet, one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Certainly, I am an unacknowledged legislator, but I have written not a jot of verse since I left school. I have even been acknowledged on several occasions, albeit under a pseudonym.
    Finally, when in the apartment, I am in complete control of my destiny. I may be subjected to an earthquake, for this part of Italy is prone to such. I may be poisoned by the daytime car fumes. I may be struck by lightning during the summer storm – there is no finer spot in the world to watch the gods sport than in the loggia – or have a loose piece of aircraft fall on me. That is by the way. No one can avoid such unpredictabilities.
    What I am safe from are the predictables, the risks which can be assessed, analysed and accounted for, the vagaries of