You are in a foreign country if the streets are named after unfamiliar dates. Not that many British streets are named after dates even of the most familiar kind, though one or two, thanks to the bad joke played on the inhabitants by city planners, might suitably be renamed “1st April Street”.

Anyway, as I was pottering around Florence in the cold – so hard it was itself news – bills for Corriere Fiorentino (the regional edition of the daily) exclaimed: “Court says no to Article 18.” Ah, yes, Article 18, perhaps related to our own dear Article 50.

Inside, it explained that the court (its judges of a species sporting gold braid) had said no, not to the Article, but to a referendum on it. The Article concerns jobs, or at least the bit above the surface does. The 90 per cent beneath the surface concerns the failure of Matteo Renzi, the rise of populism, the banking crisis and the future of the European Union.
So my emblematic numeracy was already piqued when I read in Il Foglio of “the famous footnote No 351”. Il Foglio, produced in Milan, harks back to days when broadsheets came in ones, and it takes little space folded at the back of the newsstand, few wanting to buy it. (It’s €2.50: that’s more than two espressos.)