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Updated: October 4, 2026
It is called Mount Muretta and occupies a commanding situation. For reasons which I will leave you, Signer Commissario, to investigate, this gentleman climbed up that mountain and was observed, on the very summit, making calculations and taking measurements with instruments." Now why did I climb up that wretched Muretta? For an all-sufficient reason: it was a mountain.
But to climb in war-time, without any object save that of exercising one's limbs and verifying a questionable legend, a high and remote mountain Muretta happens to be neither the one nor the other would have seemed to an Italian an incredible proceeding. I thought it better to assume the role of accuser in my turn: an Oriental trick. "This director," I said, "calls himself a patriot.
Thus I spoke while perfect innocence, mother of invention, lent wings to my words, and while thinking all the time: You little vermin, what are you doing here, in that chair, when you should be delving the earth or breaking stones, as befits your kind? I tried to picture myself climbing up Muretta with a theodolite bulging out of my pocket. A flagon of port would have been more in my line.
I desired to verify a legend connected with this mountain, the tradition of a vanished castle or hamlet in its upper regions to whose former existence the name of a certain old family, still surviving at Orvinio, bears witness. "We are not really from Orvinio," these people will tell you. "We are from the lost castle of the Muretta."