Made Polypropylene

A tiled laboratory in Milan on a grey March afternoon, pale window light, the room otherwise empty, a long dark-brown wooden bench, on it a tilting dark steel autoclave in a heating jacket, a tall glass extractor in a black clamp rack, a glass dish of white waxy powder, beside the bench a tall red and a smaller green gas cylinder, a glass vacuum gauge, the man, a man of fifty-one, grey-streaked hair combed back, dark suit under an open white lab coat, writing in a small diary held low, his face in three-quarter view, alone at the bench.