The Question Of The Lens
The lens was the thing Giulia had been saving.
She had seen it for the first time on the Monday of her second week — Sara had taken her up into the lantern room with a look of practised disappointment, expecting her to be impressed in the tourist way, and Giulia had been impressed in the architect way, which was different. The fourth-order Fresnel lens in the lantern room of the Faro di Monteriggi had been installed in 1887, replaced in 1971 with a rotating electrical optic, and then, inexplicably, left in situ rather than sold or thrown out. It sat now on a wooden pallet to the side of the modern mechanism, wrapped in canvas, with its brass ring visible around the base and a hairline crack through one of the lower prisms that had been there, Sara said, since at least the 1950s.
Giulia had spent most of the third week making discreet phone calls.
She called a man in Livorno who restored ships' instruments and knew lenses. She called the *Istituto Idrografico della Marina* in Genoa. She called a workshop outside Paris — cold-called them, in French that she was rustier in than she would have liked — that restored Fresnel optics for municipalities. She called a glassworks in Murano that she had worked with once on a chapel restoration and that owed her a favour. She made the calls from the café in the village because the signal at the lighthouse was no good, and Teresa at the