Inarea

Today is the day before February 14th and some silver-haired readers may remember an old adage about liking something or lumping it. But are we absolutely certain that there are no other possible alternatives to this (ahem) ‘sugary’ routine? Talking about love may imply realising that many of those things that are (or are not) one’s cup of tea can be talked about “even if (or precisely because) we don’t know exactly what we’re talking about”. This is what Italian writer Diego De Silva suggests in his preface to a book by Raymond Carver whose title we have borrowed as our own title of today. We could start by counting all those little things that never make it over the fence into the memorable, like buttered toast or steaming-hot coffee or tea. Love is perhaps the sum of the simple things in life: the jam on the toast, the cream in that coffee, the lump of sugar in one’s cup of tea.

The cultivation of flowers on the Ligurian coast takes us back to the second half of the 19th century when gardeners on the Riviera used to load large baskets of roses and carnations onto trains bound for the far reaches of the continent: The European aristocracy, so we are told, simply couldn’t resist these flowers whose fragrance bespoke the Mistral wind of Sanremo (San Remo), which still today holds the national record in this sector.  In 2022 the University of Turin used artificial intelligence to process the Sanremo Song Festival’s 1,741 songs from 1951 onwards, according to the eight basic emotions defined in American psychologist Plutchik’s “Wheel of Emotions”, i.e. trust, surprise, disgust, joy, anger, fear, sadness and anticipation. The result is quite predictable and applies to the entire flowerbed of songs: that which rhymes with ‘feel-good’ takes the lion’s share; in other words, songs that feature a ‘positivity bias’ with reassuring melodies will be hummed by all and sundry and eagerly seized upon by both the new and old media. In 2010 the Accademia della Crusca (Italy’s linguistic academy) confirmed, using analogical methods, that “love” is by far the most recurrent word at the top of a virtual ‘hit parade’. However, the fact remains that despite this garden of delights, the Sanremo sentiment hits several sore notes: sometimes it’s either lost or withered, or else it requires one to beware of thorns and, especially, unfaithful lovers. Therefore, seeing as there is one successful duo that has never been out of tune – “Dog and Fidelity” – how about putting sentiment on a lead in order to solve the problem at, ahem, the “root”?

The vanishing point of a painting is the spot to which our eye is drawn and that gives us the intended perspective; but who’s to say the eye wouldn’t prefer to continue roving? A bit like Vermeer’s  “Astronomer” which is now in the Louvre, but once belonged to the Rothschilds, the Jewish banking family. The Führer wanted to get his hands on it, so it was requisitioned in 1940 when the Germans took Paris, purportedly to rescue it from degenerate non-Aryan collectors. At the end of the war, the masterpiece was returned to France, but a small swastika is still stamped on the back. In more or less the same period, Italy was swarming with officials abusing their office: they would help themselves to works of art and escort them in their “Topolino” cars (the ancestors of the iconic FIAT 500) to provincial fortresses, where they were much safer from bombings; or they would keep a Piero della Francesca in their living room for a few days so as to make sure it stayed ‘at home’. This is what happened to the “Madonna of Senigallia”, the signature image of the “Liberated Art” exhibition (“Arte Liberata. 1937-47”) at the Scuderie del Quirinale (the former Papal Stables, now belonging to the Quirinal Presidential Palace in Rome). Visitors are invited to continue depackaging the poster we designed in the exhibition rooms, where they will find the entire epic of these “Monuments Men”. The exhibition is on until 10 April, but it seems spot-on to talk about it today to remind ourselves that memory is a matter of training: it begins every year on 28th January and continues until the 27th of the following year.  Piero’s Child is holding a flower and that is where we imagine our butterfly’s vanishing point to be. A stroke of the brush that deviates and goes back to the big picture, history, so that we can start not forgetting.

“The silence of the place was dreadful”, is how Perrault describes the Prince’s impression when he arrives at the castle, shortly before breaking the spell which had kept Beauty asleep for one hundred years. We could do with a fairy tale, even after one week; a week during which, with a great deal of effort, we found ourselves having to climb down from the comet and resist our homes’ cosiness that kept slyly beckoning us back to bed. Indeed it would take a ruse to trick “Blue Monday”, a name that will be plastered all over the web today to remind us that this particular Monday is a bit more depressing than usual. In actual fact, the concept had been devised some time back as a publicity stunt by a travel agency; the latter claimed to have calculated the date based on a peculiar mathematical equation that summed together the cold and dismal weather conditions with having to go back to work. The formula was later dismissed as pseudoscience. In the original version of “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” the fairy tale unexpectedly takes on nightmarish tones after the wake-up kiss: the Prince and Princess have to deal with an ogress mother-in-law-queen, protect their children from her and see to the running of a castle. A far cry from the “and they lived happily ever after” ending. But then we too need to rise and shine: washing away those Monday blues under the shower may help us make a fresh start.

One word always flutters at the transition from one year to the next: almanac, which, according to the meaning of the original Arabic word from which it derives, refers to day-by-day projects and moon phases. Thus, even a horoscope is an almanac, even a to-do list for the coming months, or even the planting of rose beds. In English we call these “New Year’s resolutions”: and if we take aim well, such resolutions can well turn into mini revolutions.  We have essentially described the butterfly effect, that phenomenon studied in the 1960s by Edward Lorenz according to which a butterfly flapping its wings in China can trigger a chain reaction all the way to the United States. In other words, never underestimate the small choices of our microclimate. The coming year may not always be a proverbial bed of roses but, we do have 52 weeks ahead to avoid flying straight into the net. Happy New Year!

In designing a calendar called Socksymbol we wanted to give voice to a garment that usually plays from the bench. However, as a consequence of the two-year slowdown – and working from home – the sock ended up becoming a player of the First XI, man-marking the fridge and sofa.  With a return to normal life, we pulled our socks up while, at the same time, sending them back below deck. However, that hasn’t stopped them being the little devils in the detail: coloured, mismatched, too long or too short, too light or too heavy, darned, shabby and often decidedly unsuitable. “Would you trust a man in socks and sandals?” asked The Guardian in an article a few years ago. Because socks are always of essence when it comes to first impressions – as well as the subject of many jokes and giggles. No point in getting cold feet this Christmas so, as the festivities approach, while we say bless your cotton socks, we also encourage you to make sure you wear warm, cosy ones if the weather is frosty. A particularly snazzy pair will knock the socks off your friends and relatives or, perhaps, sweep them off their feet altogether. Meanwhile 2023 is budding… Happy holidays from Inarea

December is the month we measure the year as if counting with an abacus. But no worries, at least as far as words are concerned: the newly-coined ones that get most frequently mentioned usually don’t give us too much of headache. Although they come charging through the palisades, they generally consist in the name of one’s sweetheart or of a new baby. However there are other words marching on history too. Last December Pantone predicted that “Very Peri”, the ultimate shade of periwinkle, was going to be the colour of the year. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean it has been the most searched term during the past 12 months – nor has “war”, for that matter. Ever heard of  “Wordle”? That’s the one, according to Google’s Year in Search overview. Wordle is an online game in which you have to guess a five-letter English word; it has been so popular with users that it is included in the New York Times subscription package. It seems that hitting the right combination raises serotonin levels. Wordle leaves Google 2022 slightly more “war-less”. After all, if this year’s war tactics have at times seemed closer to gambling than anything else, we feel we can risk taking this to another level and, for good measure, even imagine deploying our cannon to conquer Kamchatka… in a game of Risk. It may be an exercise of pure make-believe, but at least we can call it a measured war scenario.

According to a time-honoured tradition, today is the day that we Italians put up our Christmas trees and proceed to staging our nativities. Let’s imagine, however, that we’re flying over another classic Christmas scene: New York, Fifth Avenue and the Metropolitan Museum. The Christmas tree lights are about to be switched on but, as we get closer, we can see that the Big Apple’s nativity scene isn’t exactly an indigenous one: all the figurines that the decorate the MET’s tree come from an 18th-century Neapolitan crèche. Perhaps what is so appealing about crèches is that they’re a bit like a Polaroid photo that pops out every year with a sparkle or retro filter-effect. The bustling characters represent our multiple temperaments, although of course nobody wants to identify with the mean innkeeper. There’s a specific script and the characters all gravitate round the central scene or the ox and the ass duo. It’s a timeless set: we look at the world’s most famous crèche, at the Certosa di San Martino in Naples, with the same gaze as the collector Cuciniello did two hundred years ago when he set up and donated the baroque nativity to the monastery. The only figurines that have a certain freedom of movement within the prescribed script are the sheep: it’s not unusual to see them perched on top of the temple or wandering around in random order. From Manhattan to the nativity shops on Via San Gregorio Armeno in Naples, one makes allowances for their easy-going pastoral demeanour. If not three bags full, our little ovine will be able to provide plenty of pencil shavings; definitely paler than the wool sheared off “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, but gently, and with a few “sharps”, they’ll fit nicely into the tune.

At the Fondazione Prada in Milan Rem Koolhaas and Salvatore Settis have mounted a Roman sarcophagus on a desk: visitors are invited to sit down on an office chair to observe the marble artefact. It’s almost an explicit invitation not to get distracted. It was the Romans themselves who had favoured the idea of a “comfortable” observation point: when they erected Trajan’s Column, they knew that by climbing up to the terrace at the top of the Basilica Ulpia they could survey the war between the Romans and Dacians just a stone’s throw away. As time went by, however, it was clear that the Basilica had been a venue of convenience, a commodity, linked to a specific moment of need; consequently, it has since disappeared, practically without a trace (while the Column itself survived because it was recycled as a bell tower for a church).  The word “commodity” comes from the French “commodité” and means something that is convenient or comfortably available. Commodities camouflage themselves into our lives, to the point that we often don’t even notice them – unless a ‘hiccup’ of some kind occurs. Can soup thrown at a painting be considered a hiccup? Yes, in a way, if we consider Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” part of our everyday landscape: they certainly seem to have comfortably wheedled their way onto our desktops, ties and mugs.  People will be able to visit Italian state museums for free next Sunday, 4 December  (a privilege granted every day to those who live in a city like London). Fingers crossed that no happenings involving tomato sauce occur, Italy could comfortably win this round with one single painting by Parmigianino (the nickname of the great painter means “the little one from the city of Parma”, in other words, “the little Parmesan”). Will our mouths water as we look at his masterpiece, like the great Italian actor Alberto Sordi’s did as his eyes greedily devoured the pasta on a plate in front of him in a famous film from the 1950s? Buon appetito!

Medieval books of hours always featured sections – flourishes – that didn’t contain the devotional prayers to be said at the canonical hours. In these miniature drawings, which in technical jargon were called “Marginalia”, the illuminators would let their imagination run free. One of the strangest and most popular drawings of this kind depicts a knight in combat with a snail; and what is even more peculiar is that it wasn’t the latter who was shown to be losing the duel. This has given rise to a myriad interpretations: could it have been a warning to beware of garden parasites or of social climbers? Or did it allude to the hopelessness of a war waged by the poor against the rich, or perhaps against the Lombards? According to scholars, the snail symbol is far too slimy to have just one possible and irrefutable meaning. In informatics a symbol resembling a snail (and which is called precisely that in Italian) represents connection, although it did in fact originate in ledgers where it meant that items were being sold/bought “each at the price of”. Come to think of it, it’s a symbol that is particularly apt for the month of November with its Black Friday and shopping frenzy. Do we feel a bit like Sir Lancelot jousting against a mad cyborg and will we, like our ancestors, lose both the tournament and our common sense? Our guess is that no one will be able to resist the enticing snail price and there’ll be the usual rush to grab a bargain, even if only a pair of socks in the same colour as granny’s wallpaper. You can bet your little cotton socks that’s exactly what’s going to happen…