ABSTRACT
My journey to the Italian village of Pari has been a strange one, not so much guided by logical decisions and careful planning, but rather pushed along by quirks of fate and intuitive promptings. I was born in Liverpool, England where I developed a passion for science, or more exactly for experiments carried out in a shed behind my home. In retrospect, what I was doing was closer to alchemy than to any formal scientific endeavor. I was experiencing the way matter changes; its essential mutability as metals dissolved in acids, solutions crystallized, solids transformed into gases and gases condensed into liquids.
