Each story of self-education has, to be sure, its period slant. Lewis Carroll’s Alice learns to resist the world’s nonsense, however seductively dressed as logic, but she also learns, Victorianly, that manners matter.

According to a pentito in the 2004 DDA investigation, 50 percent of the shops in Naples alone are actually run by the Camorra.

Another early video work, Crystal (1982), features videomicrography of actual crystal growth mapped to the changing melodic and harmonic motion of the layered and continuously playing electroacoustic soundtrack.

Every day I pass a wall, some five hundred square feet of which a gentleman has taken to declare that he is ‘out’ to break the Undertakers’ Trust. Half the advertisement is a coloured photograph of himself. The rest is, “See what I give you for 75 dols.!” and a list of what he does give. He gives everything that the most morbid taphologist could suggest, beginning with “splendidly carved full-size oak casket, with black ivory handles. Four draped Flambeaux …” and going on to funereal ingenuities that would have overwhelmed Mausolus, and make death impossible for a refined man.