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waterways could be. At six o’clock, a water-taxi idled right beneath my window for what seemed like an hour, thoughtless as any London cabbie running his diesel engine while he waited for his fare to arrive. Giving up on silence, I got out of bed and shrugged on the huge woolly sweater that was a permanent feature of my wardrobe from October to April back home in England.
    Of course, I would dress more carefully for my visit to the library later on. More specifically, I would be dressing carefully for my first meeting with the library’s owner.
     
    Marco Donato was, as my new colleagues had suggested, something of an enigma. An Internet search of his name threw up two different men. The first was Marco Donato Senior, who had made his money in shipping. The Donato family had run a popular cruise line in the 1950s, sailing out of Venice to points all over the Mediterranean. There were several pictures of Marco Senior on his ships, dining with the huge Italian celebrities of the time. I discovered that a relatively famous movie had been filmed on one of the boats, and Marco Senior had subsequently left his wife for the female star. Only to go straight back to her when he realised the star couldn’t cook anywhere near as well as his long-suffering missus . . .
    I liked the look of this first Marco. He had an easy charm about him that was doubtless born of necessity. His Wikipedia entry explained that his beginnings had been humble. Having struggled through a childhood of appalling deprivation, young Marco had given everything to succeed in the world, making his first investments with the money he saved from tips earned while working as a waiter. First of all, he bought a single water-taxi. Then another. Then a fleet. Twenty years later, he owned one of the biggest oceangoing liners in the world. He kept the first water-taxi, however, and would ride out in it on a Sunday morning. The modest boat was always as smartly turned out as a billionaire’s Riva, all gleaming brass and polished wood.
    The second Marco Donato – the one who’d been writing to me – was this dashing entrepreneur’s grandson.
     
    There’s an old saying: shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, which refers to the idea that it takes three generations to make, consolidate and then squander a fortune. Marco Donato Junior certainly seemed to be doing his best to prove the adage true. His grandfather had made the family fortune. His father had diversified the family’s interests and begun to invest in the trappings of class: the houses, the library, and the right education for his son. But Marco Donato Junior was a playboy through and through. Most of the photographs I found in my online search for him were from the mid to late 1990s and the majority of them seemed to have been taken in nightclubs.
    Marco Donato Junior was the ultimate gilded youth. Where the grandfather’s character and ambition had been born of hardship, the grandson was definitely a product of pure privilege. You could see it in his face. He was handsome as any Michelangelo statue, with sculpted cheekbones and seductive dark eyes beneath a mop of softly curling black hair. His lips were full and sensuous. His habitual expression was a cat-that-got-the-cream grin.
    He was tall and broad-shouldered. Obviously a keen sportsman. When he wasn’t being photographed in clubs, he was often pictured on a horse or with a racket in his hand. I couldn’t help noticing he had excellent biceps, which were showcased to perfection by his designer polo shirts, especially when he was resting an elbow on the windowsill of a soft-top sports car: another favourite pose.
    Like his grandfather before him, this younger Marco seemed to enjoy the company of celebrities. He was frequently photographed alongside film stars and musicians. He was certainly never pictured alone. Those companions who weren’t bona fide celebrities still had a touch of stardust about them: invariably female, young and