Sliding doors

You are in front of the TV and there is still talk of Covid-19. A hospital in Rome, the Spallanzani, is mentioned, which has been called “aworld excellence in the fight against Coronavirus”. You are quite tired and maybe your eyes closed for a few seconds. But just for a few seconds, now you’re awake again… but no longer sitting on your couch! It looks like a chemistry laboratory, but all technologies and instruments are not modern ones! It feels like going back in time! But what’s going on? A man in a white coat is busy working and seems very worried! You ask him for an explanation: he shows up and says he is… Lazzaro Spallanzani!!! Amazing, the person after whom the hospital you heard about on TV is named! He is trying to complete an important experiment that can refute the principle of spontaneous generation that the scientific community intends to continue to support, also in the light of an experiment conducted by his English colleague,  John Needham. Spallanzani is convinced that all this is absurd and you feel that he is right … From your studies you remember that the theory of spontaneous generation was later refuted, in 1859,  by the French Louis Pasteur  (“Spontaneous generation is a chimera!”). For Spallanzani it is important to be able to complete the experiment within an hour, because if this is not the case, he will lose his job and his name will be muddied forever! You can’t afford it! Lazzaro needs one last component that seems to have disappeared from the laboratory. He is certain that someone hid it so that he would not find it! Perhaps your hope of getting back on your couch is to help him find out where he was hidden, following a series of clues that the thief seems to have left behind…