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).