"There once was a king who had three young sons, in the country of Serendip. As his successor, the king wanted to appoint the son who was the smartest and most capable of solving the daily problems of his people"… As a story of Arabian Nights, thus begins the version of a Persian tale in which the three sharp and clever princes of Serendip (present-day Sri Lanka) describe, as if by divination, a stolen camel they have never seen before. In reality, they infer it from small clues that seem trivial to the rest of the audience, but which, by applying deductive reasoning, allow them to make inferences and describe the animal with a mental game. The tale, translated from Persian to Italian by a certain Cristoforo Armeno and published by an Italian editor, it was translated into French and reached England, so that in 1754 Horace Walpole coined a new word, "serendipity" in a letter he sent to a friend to explain the fortuitous way in which he made an interesting discovery.