Mike Bass is likely to wake up today to find that his right leg has been amputated below the knee and that he narrowly escaped death. The last thing the venerable trainer will remember was feeling rather off-colour with an apparent stomach bug a few days ago.This is a shocking situation, and for a man who has spent most of his life fretting about the state of health of his horses' legs it carries a strange irony.Horse racing is a fraternity in which the members feel as if they know others in the game quite well - even if they've never actually met them. Yet it's a world of ferocious competitiveness that's wont to spill over into suspicion and bitchiness. No prisoners are taken when horses gallop and dough's on the line.But if misfortune befalls a member of the family, there's a sense of shared anguish. This is someone who views life through your prism.Mike Bass is a titan of the game, the elder statesman of the Western Cape turf and the brains behind umpteen big-race winners. His great champion was Pocket Power, but Dunford and Trademark also won him Durban Julys.I read that Bass contracted a type of swine flu, which degenerated into pneumonia and then septicaemia. On the stable's website, Mike's son Mark posted that the maestro nearly died.Yesterday, the site reported that virulent infections had been brought under control and sedation was being reduced - to the extent that the patient might wake up today. Best of luck to him.I've been in Italy for two weeks and saw very few horses.There were some decent-looking specimens pulling traps full of tourists around the streets of Florence, with bags strategically placed under the tail to catch the dump before it fouled cobblestones in the ancient city of arts.But the best nags spotted were rather older - possibly 25 centuries older. These were the Triumphal Quadriga, or the four Horses of Saint Mark, and might be the finest horse sculptures in the world.They were created in the 4th century BC, some say by Greek sculptor Lysippos, and adorned the Hippodrome of Constantinople - a chariot racetrack that pulled in the punters of antiquity. Made largely of copper, the horses have stunning realism for such ancient artefacts.After the sacking of the Byzantine empire during the Fourth Crusade, the great beasts were uncoupled from the chariot they'd been pulling for 1 600 years and in 1254 were shipped to Venice and erected on the terrace of the Basilica of San Marco, which stands conspicuously in a corner of the city's famous piazza.Their travelling days were far from over, for when Napoleon rode into town in 1797 he took a shine to these nags glinting in the Venetian sunshine and decided they'd look rather fetching atop his new Arc de Triomphe in Paris- where, indeed, they spent the next 18 years.In 1815, after the Battle of Waterloo, the horses were returned to Venice and their old spot on top of the church. In 1980, it was noticed they'd lost a bit of condition thanks to air pollution, so they were moved within the shelter of the sanctified space below - and replaced with copies.Last week I gazed at these metallic forms and I felt like I was looking over the shoulders of Petrarch, Polo, Michelangelo, Canaletto, Goethe, Vivaldi, Proust, Byron, Mann, Fellini and millions of others, who'd stood right there and been awed by the four proud beasts as they strode through the ages...