The assignment was a hard one. For homework, Agata, Allegra and Mucci had to indicate and identify the different geometric forms of public, civil and religious buildings, monuments in the city and its surroundings: City Hall, the museum, the sports arena, the school, the hospital, the fire house, the headquarters of the carabinieri, the police department, the cathedral, the fountain, the newsstand.

The math teacher had chosen this exercise as a way to explain to the children and the animals how to classify plane and solid shapes by identifying them in the landscape around them. 

The week in Bassano had flown by as they raced to find triangles, squares, pentagons, circles, trapezoids, cubes, prisms and parallelepipeds. Armed with patience and curiosity, they had found a lot of them: the only thing they were missing was a sphere shape. Finally, crestfallen, they turned to the bottomless well of their grandfather Vittorio ‘s knowledge, and he instantly reassured them. “A round building? You are right, there are very few of them, but tomorrow we will go to Possagno, in the province of Treviso. Why you ask? We will tell you soon. You don’t know where it is? Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that right away, I should have taken you there before… but there is such a vast and beautiful heritage in the Veneto region that it is hard to make a list of places to visit”. The children looked satisfied. Their doubts had been put to rest.