More often than not, it is small accidents and coincidences that end up yielding exceptional literary fruits. This is how the story that has led to the first Catalan translation of The Lives by Giorgio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511 - Florence, 1574) begins: every summer, the Valencian lawyer Martí Domínguez Pérez would take his family to Italy, where they would combine leisure with visits to museums and churches. "It was in 1979, while we were in Arezzo, that my father, a great lover of Italian culture, stopped at the window of a small bookstore where they had the nine volumes of the Sansoni edition of The Lives, where Vasari was written in huge letters, as if he were a rock star. My father hesitated whether or not to buy that edition, which cost 20,000 pesetas. It was a significant amount of money at the time," recalls his son, the writer and biologist Martí Domínguez i Romero, author of novels such as Mater (Proa, 2022) and essays such as The Dream of Lucretius (Pòrtic, 2013).

Joan Baptista Peset Aleixandre was a prestigious Valencian doctor, professor of legal medicine and rector of the University of Valencia, shot by the Franco regime in May 1941. He came from a brilliant liberal lineage of Valencian doctors and intellectuals (his father was one of the honorary presidents of the First Congress of Doctors, Popular Front in the 1936 elections, integrated into the party of Manuel Azaña, Republican Left).

Juan Bautista Peset (Godella, 1886 - Paterna, 1941) might have been spared a firing squad. A doctor and rector of the University of Valencia, Franco sentenced him to 30 years and one day, but some of his faculty colleagues weren't satisfied. They filed a second complaint and, to convince the Francoists, sent a lecture in which the only parish priest shot after the Civil War defended republicanism. Peset was buried in the tomb of his younger brother, who had died when he was just 2 years old. Until the arrival of democracy, no one dared to put his name in the cemetery.