Inarea

Paris, Rome, New York, London: one thing they have in common is that, regardless of their latitudes, they can knock us out. Therefore, a community spirit, under a slogan involving emotions, is what is needed to lift people’s spirits. Someone who was well aware of this was Milton Glaser, the great designer who in 1977 created the campaign that put a heart between the “I” and NY, New York. What if, swopping a couple of letters, instead of “I love” we were to ask ourselves what do “l owe” the city? The result wouldn’t change as we’re quite sure that the word “love” would be among the first three thoughts that spring to mind. We owe the city love for all the persons and jobs we’ve found there, encounters that would perhaps not have happened elsewhere. Even those who come from small places love the luxury of anonymity that you only get in a big city. The iconic Big Apple logo has been retired and has been refreshed with a new font (based on the Subway’s lettering). It now reads “we love”: implicitly, the community are being invited to take care of their city. All you need is love, and one hour a week, so they say. “What we can do for the city”, with its accent on community spirit, could become the new slogan. Let’s remember this, and demonstrate true sportsmanship every time those daily blows our cities deal us make us feel like engaging in a boxing match with them.

The ultimate paradox for writers of tragedies is to die in an almost comical manner. Spring begins tonight, yet it’s already been a few weeks since we started orienting our antennae towards the sun. That’s what Aeschylus was doing – enjoying the seaside warmth outside his home in Gela, Sicily – on a sunny day in 456 B.C. when an eagle, mistaking the playwright’s head for a rock, dropped a tortoise (it’s not clear if it was a ‘tortoise’ or a ‘turtle’, though in any case it’ll always be a turtle if you’re reading this in America!) onto his head, so as to crack open its prey’s shell and eat it. Spring is always associated with ‘something’ in the air: love, according to an old song, or pollen embroidering the sky. Whatever it is, it all comes sweeping down suddenly in the middle of March. We instead hope that the season will “make haste slowly”, just like the tortoise/turtle (being at sea with a sail affixed to its shell, it probably was a turtle, also for UK readers) on Duke Cosimo de’ Medici’s emblem, thereby slowing up the arrival of the next. That’s why our own version is green, unripe and hard to crack open. In three months’ time here in Italy we’ll all be like tortoises holed up in our air-conditioned carapaces. On the other hand, keeping out of the scorching sun may have its advantages. Remember Aeschylus…

“Good evening, brothers and sisters!” This greeting, vibrating with familiarity and spoken 10 years ago by a gentleman looking out from the balcony on St Peter’s Square, became a signature style: that of a certain Francis, elected Pope on 13 March 2013. As designers, we sow seeds, hoping they’ll spill over onto some unknown slope; we cherish the moment when a project comes into bud, after which it invariably flourishes with a life of its own… Given this premise, we find a certain concept carried forward by Jorge Bergoglio quite fascinating. He often speaks of “incomplete thinking”, an antidote which permits one to get to the heart of things whilst holding back a little bit of oneself. It’s a double-sided concept. Incomplete thinking always gives way to something: relationships, God, love, creativity or, in our own small case, imagination. In these “Modern Times” of ours, we tip our hats to a philosophy that is versatile in the here and now.

Tonight the waxing moon is on its way to becoming (tomorrow night, 7 March) a full moon. It is called “Worm Moon” by the Farmers’ Almanac, a name which refers to the earthworms that emerge from the soil around now, as the weather gets warmer and spring showers begin to fall. Not only is the light of the Earth’s satellite not particularly brilliant, but this month the moon is also spineless, a planet without a backbone. Come to think of it, what is the comfort zone of these crawling critters if not, for example, an apple? Yet if we close our eyes and imagine one such fruit, the first image that probably comes to mind is the logo, glowing with led lights, of a famous brand. And seeing as (presumably) a human has just taken a bite out of said apple, that must mean we are on our way to purging nature of all that is “natural” … In order to get us to reflect on the apple “inhabited” by a worm, Caravaggio painted his basket of fruit higher than eye level, compelling us to stretch our necks in order to look upwards at it. We could do exactly the opposite and be incited by the Worm Moon to bend our necks downwards, if only for a few moments, in order to tune in to the natural rhythm of the Earth. So what should we ask of the full moon on these two nights? Not to be a ‘rotten apple’ but, rather, to work a miracle.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet famously says that “Time is out of joint” and that he was born to set it right. There was a monarch who took this literally. In 1712 King Karl XII of Sweden found himself compelled to add an extra day onto the month of February, over and beyond the 29th, owing to problems of synchronization between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Many centuries earlier, the Emperor Augustus had taken a day off from February so as upgrade the month named after himself to 31 days. February 30th was a one-off date, shrouded in-between the folds of history: we’re unaware if some Swedish soldier may have distinguished himself on the battlefield (there was a war on against Russia, led by Peter the Great), or if anything noteworthy happened on that day. Those 24 hours are still seeking rhyme or reason; all we can do is look for ours. As is the case every Monday, our diary is rapidly filling up with things to do, yet we already know we’re not going to be able to tick some of the more elusive ones off the to-do list: errands, wild goose chases, will-o’-the-wisps. We could try postponing the lot to 30th February, International Procrastinated Projects Day. On the stroke of March nobody will be able to demand that we account for them.

In many countries – including Italy – Carnival is traditionally a season of excess and masquerading, of merrymaking before Lent. Anything goes, topsy-turvy becomes the new normal; and as revellers strut around in fancy dress, preening themselves like parrots, the comic, the ironic, the burlesque and the satirical become jumbled up and difficult to distinguish from each other. One person who did attempt to distinguish between the funny and the ironic was Italian author Luigi Pirandello. He wrote that seeing a lady gauchely dolled-up like “an exotic parrot” might make one laugh because of one’s perception of the opposite. On the other hand, it could well be that this same lady finds no pleasure in dressing up that way and that she might only be doing so in order to hold on to the love of a younger husband or to deceive herself into thinking she can make time stand still… Pirandello concludes that this reflection makes one shift to a feeling of the opposite, with the initial impression of comicality giving way to what he defines as a sense of the “humoristic” – an Englishman would probably mention a “wry smile”. During Carnival, however, the parrot-lady will be able to get away with such over-dressing and heavy make-up. And, especially if her anonymity is hidden behind a mask. who’s to say that she won’t feel as free as a bird and as fresh as a daisy?

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.