Andy had led a fortunate life. Strangely, despite being undistinguished in his own endeavours, he’d nevertheless made the acquaintance of quite a number of impressive people. He’d shared the Chinese tea ceremony in the Master’s Lodge of Caius College with Professor Joseph Needham, the pioneering biochemist, Maoist, and Morris dancer. He’d sailed with a towering Sierra Leone bosun, who’d survived the British Trent tanker disaster by jumping from a burning deck into a burning sea. He’d met and escorted Satish Kumar, the Jain monk who’d walked from India to Moscow and Paris and London and Washington to campaign for nuclear disarmament. And now, on the cusp of retirement, a scholar gypsy attending a rather drab academic HIV/AIDS conference at Bologna University, Andy found himself in conversation with a very impressive woman, whom we shall call Professore Aurora, lest the lady is still alive (though, if that were to be the case, she would now be a very great age).

They had bonded over their dislike of the immediately previous conference presentation and over the tragedy of the continuing HIV infections among drug users through contaminated needles. Aurora went on to ask Andy, based at a Scottish university, whether there was any new information on why, at the beginning of the epidemic, the rate of HIV infections among drug users in Edinburgh was so much higher than that of drug users in Glasgow:

‘Please Andrew, you will forgive me if I have been misinformed, but I understand that there are many more injecting drug users in Glasgow than in Edinburgh. And yet far fewer of the Glasgow drug users contracted HIV than did the Edinburgh drug users. The two cities, I know, are very close, but I was wondering if the illegal drugs market was rather different in each place?’

Andy was rather taken aback and gazed at the small, carefully spoken, middle-aged Italian with frank admiration. ‘You’re dead right, Aurora. In Edinburgh, and particularly in the district where drug users congregated, it was commonplace to call on a dealer for the hit and use a syringe supplied by the dealer – “dealer’s works.” Users were wary of carrying their own syringes in case they were stopped by the Edinburgh police. In effect, drug users were sharing a syringe with a dealer’s previous customers.’

‘Ah-hah, yes. Two cities, two different police forces. Always the shape of the drugs market is influenced in part by the pattern of police enforcement.’

Aurora proceeded, politely but forensically, to ask Andy more questions about the Glasgow drugs market. When Andy mentioned the big break-in at the pharmaceutical warehouse in East Kilbride, she nodded and smiled: ‘Ah Yes, synthetic opioids – Temgesic, you say – the perfect dealer product. No need to pay unreliable foreign suppliers. No concerns about purity or contaminants. The planning of the break-in, the safe storage of the stolen product, the orderly distribution – they all indicate a major criminal network, a well-organised drug market.’

She paused: ‘You are perspiring. The climate here in Bologna in August does not suit you. You need mountain air. Come, we will catch a bus into the Apennines. You shall tell me more about the Glasgow drugs market and I will show you the wonder and tragedy of Marzabotto. Have you heard of the Etruscans?’

#

So, they caught a bus to the little town of Marzabotto, up in the Tuscan hills, some 30 kilometres from Bologna. I had known very little about the Etruscans, but Aurora filled me in on the journey. The Etruscans flourished in Tuscany from around 900BC to 250BC, when they were conquered by the Romans and absorbed into the Roman Empire. They were family centred, monogamous with equality of the sexes. Indeed, they were so family centred that they liked to keep their dead near them, cremated and installed in a single, multi-generational, family tomb. They were musicians and dancers, fine sculptors in terracotta and workers in bronze. Their priests were seers – oracles who could be consulted for interpretation and instruction; they were widely consulted by the Romans. Etruria was a loose federation of autonomous city states and Marzabotto was the site of one such city.

We got off the bus and could immediately see the huge site, down below us on a plateau, a little above the valley floor – a neat network of streets, foundations of houses, workshops, temples, an acropolis, and a water system (apparently, they were also accomplished engineers). Beside the site was an impressive modern building, The National Etruscan Museum. In the museum (air-conditioned), were sculptures and bronzes, large and small. Some figures were clearly Greek influenced, others were strangely elongated and almond-eyed. The tiny bronze votive offerings were particularly affecting.

Part of the attraction was undoubtedly the mysteriousness of this remote civilisation: the Etruscan script and language has never been fully deciphered – almost everything we know of their lives and thoughts has come to us from the Romans and from archaeological interpretation. We were still discussing this as we were coming out of the museum and as Aurora guided me to a roadside monument.

The monument commemorated the massacre in 1944 of 770 (yes, seven hundred and seventy) people from Marzabotto and the surrounding farms by the Nazi SS, as a ‘collective punishment’ for the activities of the partisans operating in the area. The contrast with the Etruscan past was like a slap in the face.

Aurora shook her short grey hair and turned away, her eyes wet. ‘Let no-one ever say that European civilisation has progressed since 250BC and let no-one call the AIDS epidemic a collective punishment of junkies, gays and prostitutes.’

Michael Bloor