The Man Who Seduced The Mona Lisa. Dionigi Cristian Lentini

      Prologue

      It was the private message Francesca had sent while he was heading towards the abbey in his dated methane gas convertible.

      He hadn't even heard the ping of the notification. In fact, he was on speakerphone with Professor De Rango who, for the 33rd time, was recommending that he do a good job and to take care to say hello to father Enzo, the rector's abbot friend… and who knows how many other directors and managers.

      After exactly twenty-seven seconds he decided to implement the emergency plan foreseen in such cases by the survival procedure against head breakers........: “simulation of the sudden loss of signal by activating the state of unreachability for the next 30 minutes”.

      Claudio, a forty-year-old researcher without a permanent contract at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics at the CNR in Pisa, eight years of checks and “while actually employed” contracts on his curriculum vitae, had been sent urgently to address a problem the Anglo-Saxons call: “Damage assessment and disaster recovery”, in practice it was an intervention that would assess the damage and restore the data to the digital archive at an ancient Tuscan abbey that had, 48 hours earlier, suffered a cyber attack by an exalted Russian hacker.

      Obviously, the thought of spending the whole week in a medieval library recovering digitized scrolls, reinstalling operating systems, analyzing Gregorian chants of prayers and songs (perhaps without even a porno movie), while the world outside was at that time concerned with blockchain and cryptocurrency, filled him with tremendous enthusiasm.

      Over the past year he hadn’t produced a single scientific publication. This was not because he had not done enough research or hadn’t achieved concrete results… perhaps it was simply because he hadn’t yet found anything of true value that was worth sharing with the rest of the planet. For this reason, as soon as they could his colleagues mocked him, who, unlike him, were now publishing and patenting every single fart they emitted into the air after a meal of beans in Valleriana.

      In short, that morning not even the Eagles' cd “Hotel California” could cheer him up.

      He arrived at the summit where the abbey stood at 9:37, when the guitars of Don Felder and Joe Walsh were ending with one of the most beautiful solos in rock history.

      A cordial and alarmed friar welcomed him; he was immediately shown the way to the violated archive.

      The situation was less serious than imagined: the main server was out of action, a Trojan ransomware had encrypted half the world with a 2048-bit AES key and a ransom of 21 bitcoins had been demanded. Most of the friars didn't even know what ransomware or a bitcoin was, but fortunately the restriction (read/write only) to access permissions to the files of the backup archive had held… and besides – then they say that it isn’t true that monks are lucky – the last available copy that the automatic synchronization and backup procedure had produced was only 16 hours and 18 minutes before the attack. In short, if it hadn't been in a sacred place, our researcher would no doubt have exclaimed: “What the f…!”

      Therefore the bulk was safe. It was only about eradicating the virus and restoring about 9 terabytes of scanned manuscripts and books, and returning them manually to the mainframe from the disc copies. What relieved Claudio the most was that this operation could also be handled in Pisa, thus he could avoid the problem of his already tried palate coming into contact with the succulent dishes of that infamous three Michelin star restaurant named “The Refectory”.

      So, after only 4 hours, having given the friar, who seemed to be more alert, the necessary instructions for the restoration of the host, Claudio removed the bare essentials from the rack, loaded everything into his car and went home.

      Ah, meanwhile the smartphone had begun again to receive and that red dot on the right indicated two messages:

      – the first, from the very nice Professor De Rango, stated verbatim: “Not even the most banal freshman makes use of these tactics anymore! The phone picks up perfectly out there! I understand t I broke your… but it's important!!! Let me know as soon as we have solved it. Thank you.”

      – the second, from Francesca, contained a photo of a newspaper extract from eighteen years earlier.

      His girlfriend, in fact, knowing of the trip Claudio had won to that monastery, had managed to retrieve a copy of an article from the archives of the local newspaper where she worked, which reconstructed the dark story of the death of Father Sergio, a young heartbreaking friar, who had been murdered by a jealous husband who just could not bear to have his wife going to confession so frequently.

      The body was found in front of an altarpiece in a gruesome scenario halfway between “The Da Vinci Code” and “Seven”, between “The Name of the Rose” and “Basic Instinct”.

      Since then the case had been closed but no one had ever been able to understand what the word “sinemensura” really meant that the luminary from the Reparto Investigazioni Scientifiche (RIS or the Department of Scientific Investigation) had noted as being written on the habit of the poor religious man.

      Probably, indeed, almost certainly, if he had not read that article, with over 370 000 files to be analyzed and the Roland Garros final on TV, the researcher would not have even minimally focused on that small directory of the file system on the last disc named: “Father Sergio”.

      Inside, there were dozens of files containing love poems, photos of beautiful young women and a single file extension “.axx”, an encrypted format that was protected by a password.

      Claudio knew very well that the probability of guessing the password (11 characters out of a possible 95) was almost 0.0000000000000000000175% and that with a brute force attack of 100000 attempts per second it would have taken about 1 billion 803 million years to find, but, for once, he put the numbers aside and decided on a single attempt:

      he typed “sinemensura” and there, like a pirate standing over his treasure chest, unfolded the most beautiful story he had ever read.

      I

       The Ferrara War

      The icy wind of that winter evening did not whip the battlements of the Castle of San Giorgio as much as the wind of