I inhaled the scent of salt and sun on human skin, the smell of pistachios and turpentine coming from the islands where one would like to live and where one knows in advance one will not get off.

This is a wonderful novel by Marguerite Yourcenar, which is a fictional letter from Emperor Hadrian to his son Marcus Aurelius. Slow, full of beautiful sentences and deep thoughts, just right for reading under the shade of a tree on a hot afternoon on a Greek island.

Hadrian, indeed, was known for his obsessive interest in Greek culture and literature; traces of his presence are widespread throughout Greece. Also, his contradictory, frivolous, animistic – Mediterranean! – personality was brilliantly captured by Marguerite Yourcenar.

Where a weaver would weave his canvas, where a good accountant would correct a mistake, where an artist would improve a masterpiece still imperfect or already a little broken, nature prefers to start with clay, with chaos, and it is this wastefulness that we call the natural order of things.