Ambrogio came to love history more than anything else he happened to be introduced to during his studies. The university did not consider history a distinct subject: it was studied within the trivium, as an element of rhetoric. The young man was willing to spend hours sitting over historical writings. With their focus on the past, they (and this connected them with Ambrogio’s visions of the future) were an escape from the present. Movement away from the present—in both directions—became something Ambrogio needed as much as air, because it removed time’s unidimensionality, which caused him to
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