Fausto smelled the plank: its smell was strong, but not unpleasant. It was covered with little holes left by the nails he had pulled out. Around each hole there was a reddish halo, caused by the rust from the nail.
I don’t know what is happening, but I seem to be receiving a lot of books by Italian authors. There is Cognetti, whose best-known novel is The Eight Mountains, but also Dario Ferrari and his The Recess Is Over (which we will try to feature here).
In the days before steel, nails were made of iron and therefore rusted very easily, producing the unwelcome substance that, like all oxides, is known as iron oxide. On the other hand, to put a more positive spin on iron oxide, we can point out that the reddish colour referred to in the text makes it valued as a pigment and glaze.
In the syllabus I studied for the competitive examinations to become a secondary-school teacher, specialising in Physics and Chemistry, there was a section entitled Corrosion and Ways of Preventing It. It was really more of a catalogue of ways of delaying rather than preventing corrosion, since this is a thermodynamically inevitable phenomenon—an oxidation process that costs industry enormous amounts of money.
Some of the most effective ways of slowing it down were discussed in connection with Jacobo Bergareche’s book The Perfect Days.
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