Before I began to read the most secret part of the document, I dwelt on that strange palindrome phrase: AESIS ERONI SOTOS INORE SISEA. Reading it from left to right or from right to left, the result was the same. But there was more. Placed as it was in the document, one word below another, the sentence was inscribed in a square and could be read from left to right, from right to left, from top to bottom or from bottom to top, always getting the same words. What a puzzle. They sounded like Latin words, but the Latin syntax was incorrect, at least from my memory of what little Latin I had studied at school. AESIS certainly stood for Jesi. As for the word ERONI, Stefano had said that word to me just a few hours before, about the descendants of the consul Quintus Fabius Rulliano. But what mean
