Berlin may have seemed to some of Dent’s colleagues an odd choice for his musical sabbatical; Dent himself was uncertain about it at first. Going to Berlin meant facing up to the next impossible life task he had set himself, composing something good enough to submit for a Mus D or finding some other way forward, like the growing demand for his writings, but the next steps still eluded him.

He delayed his arrival for two months, stopping at Fano for a fortnight’s holiday at ‘this haven of rest’ after the hectic but unsatisfactory years of Cambridge music, bathing and his usual wandering, as the mood took him, playing the piano in the local cafes, going to a bizarre local production of Gorky’s The Lower Depths in Italian, even turning down a plea from Hermann Kretzschmar to give a Scarlatti paper to the prestigious IMG conference in Basel. In this idle vein, over the next month Dent’s only work was a stop at Urbino on the way to Rome to inspect the Palazzo Albani library, ‘three fine rooms full’ of scores and libretti ‘of about 1700–1730, including many of D.S.’ For most of September he was loosely based in Rome, where Emilio had found him lodgings at 6 Viaolo Cartari, his only music the military bands in the Piazzo Colonna playing Massenet’s Érinnyes, which Dent found ‘dull … Massenet’s furies all seemed to wear pink tights’. All these open-air concerts gave Dent the idea for an article on the subject. On 29 September he went on to Florence, where he found Cust in ‘a great state of excitement, as after a series of troubles (all related in detail) he has got engaged to an American widow’, while his young man Harry Burton was leaving to set up in partnership as a photographer. ‘I dined with Cust: Burton was out so I had many confidences outpoured & much scandal: also much talk about Edward Carpenter wch interested me deeply.’