I'm on my bicycle. It's Sunday, Domenica, I'm heading home from buying a newspaper at a bookstore on the Via Manzoni and an image is stuck in my head.

The photograph shows the founder of the bookstore, Gianfranco Monferrato, posing with Alfred Hitchcock. In the large black-and-white print displayed by itself behind the semi-circular counter which holds both the cash register and stacks of national and local newspapers, the film director is seated while the bookstore owner/publisher (Monferrato is also a prominent publishing house) is leaning towards him. Hitchcock holds an Italian translation, published by Monferrato, of one of his popular mystery anthologies. In the picture Monferrato's bushy moustache and eyebrows and heavy glasses suggest a Groucho Marx impersonator more than a successful publisher and scion of a great fortune. (The bookstore and publishing house, while successful in their own right, were originally financed with a small portion of the vast wealth Monferrato had inherited.) But in fact the man in the photo is neither a fake-Groucho nor a publisher/bookstore owner nor a wealthy scion; history remembers him as a suicidal terrorist.

In a month it will be 20 years since Gianfranco Monferrato blew himself up while trying to plant a bomb near an electric pylon in a nearby suburb. Ironically, one of his best-known publishing ventures were two volumes about 1960s urban guerillas in South America which became handbooks for fanatical leftist terrorists in the 1970s. (How good, one can't help wondering, were the instructions on bomb-making in those two volumes?) But I'm not about to start reviewing radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s; my only concern today is that double portrait of Monferrato and Hitchcock.

Alfred Hitchcock is known for a number of things, that is, his reputation as a film director can be broken down into a series of separate, interrelated parts which, brought together again, constitute the Hitchcock myth. These include, in no particular order:

1. He always appeared in his own movies at least once, but only as an extra in the crowd, never as a protagonist.

2. His films are often about an innocent man wrongly accused who must flee the authorities while at the same time he pursues the villains whose exposure and capture is his only hope of exoneration.

3. He had a thing for icy blondes like Kim Novak, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman.

4. The Birds, arguably his best-known movie, depicts the attempted destruction of society by thousands of small creatures working in concert.

5. He planned out each film perfectly before it was shot and famously declared that his own presence on the set was wholly superfluous.

6. He was fat.

As I roll along, the Saturday-Sunday Herald Trib in my basket, my jacket half-open, the juxtaposition of Monferrato and Hitchcock, and the prominent place accorded that juxtaposition in the flagship Monferrato store, refuses to leave my mind. Hoping for some flash of understanding, I start matching up aspects of Monferrato with those of Hitchcock.

1. In the confusing political landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gianfranco Monferrato's entrance into the world of the books he liked to publish was a walk-on part that got out of hand; where most people in his situation would have been content with making a cameo appearance, he wanted a speaking part.

2. Monferrato decided to go underground prior to being suspected of any crime, he was thus an innocent man on the run, and even if he did commit crimes before March 1972 (when the bomb went off) he did so in the service of the revolution, to protect his country from the right wing coup he was convinced to be imminent.

3. G.M. was planting his bomb at the foot of a tall structure of cold metal at whose summit there might have been a crackle of electric current.

4. The birds in Hitchcock's film are, in their own way, model terrorists, showing little concern for human life as they attempt a methodical takeover of human society.

5. & 6. These cancel each other out: Hitch was the perfect filmmaker, a flawless artist, yet in real life he was grossly overweight, the opposite of his cinematic efficiency. G.M. set out to commit a crime, to become a character in a Hitchcock film while also executing a scenario with the efficiency of the great director himself. He wanted to conquer the tall blonde, to unleash the attack of his fellow conspirators, yet he did not grasp his correlation to the real-life Hitchcock whose obesity clearly ruled anything more than a "waddle-on" part in his own films. They would never be men of action, only the men who called out "action." Hitchcock knew this perfectly well; it was G.M.'s fatal mistake not to recognize such discrepancies.

Hitchcock used to tell a story about his film version of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, a novel concerning late-19th-century European terrorists. In the film a small boy is unknowingly given a bomb to carry across London. The camera follows him sitting innocently on the slow bus (heavy traffic has delayed it) as we, the audience, know the package in his lap is ticking away. In the film, as in the book, the bomb eventually explodes, killing the boy and his fellow passengers. Hitchcock said he learned a terrible lesson from this film, which was a commercial flop. The lesson, which he never forgot, was that in any such situation, when the audience has been brought to the edge of their seats with anxiety, the anticipated event must never occur, the bomb must never ever actually go off. If it does, Hitchcock realized, the audience will never forgive the director and the film will fail.

Surely, I think, as I wheel my bicycle into the courtyard of where I live, it was all these things which the photograph was trying to say. Why else would it be there, the only visible memorial to the store's founder and namesake? Or am I looking for mysteries, for hidden meanings, where there are none? Am I like those obsessive conspiracy theorists who insist on seeing Monferrato's death as the result of a government plot? (And like those equally obsessive academics who write massive theses on the symbolism and auto-referentiality of Hitchcock's movies.) That photograph could be nothing more than a sign of Monferrato's passion for film. For all I know he was an avid Hitchcock fan. The truth is, his heirs probably chose that particular image because it showed Monferrato in a humorous, carefree mood, at complete odds with the image of an inept idealist, a wealthy man playing with dangerous toys, continually insisted on by the Italian right.

I lock my bike and race up to the apartment, impatient for news and coffee. Enough of Monferrato. I'm not going to solve this particular mystery today. And why should I? Isn't it supposed to be the day of rest? As if on cue, I hear bells start to ring as Mass lets out somewhere nearby

I decide, during what's left of this peaceful Sunday morning, that things are as they appear. Looking at the photo ("the city of Vukovar after heavy bombardment") on the front page, that other image starts to fade from my mind. I wonder if I was perhaps the only person in the world thinking of Monferrato today? I try to hold on, for a last moment, to the mirrored destinies I thought I saw in that blurring black-and-white image. For a moment, two faces superimposed, then none.