Inarea

This autumn, social networks are offering us a rather interesting journey around the world. For example there’s the Metaverse which recently celebrated its first birthday, yet is still about as densely populated as Antarctica. On the other hand, when it comes to traffic TikTok allows us to glide over a street in Beijing at rush hour, while the experience offered by Instagram resembles a souk in Marrakech: very noisy with a lot of buying and selling. Facebook, however, is a bit like a town in the Midwest becoming rapidly depopulated. What else can we look at? There’s Twitter of course which now, with Elon Musk in the cockpit, will have to go a-conquering other planets (i.e. users from totally new niches). Perhaps you may have noticed that Europe, somewhat lethargic during the years when social media platforms were making their breakthrough, doesn’t seem to be on the map for this tour. BeReal was created in 2020 by a French team but is actually emerging at present. It allows one to share photos on a real-time basis only. A notification comes in, followed by a two-minute countdown. That’s all we get to post something. A race against the clock, reminding us of Phileas Fogg and his valet Passepartout: we don’t know if BeReal will outlive the present thirst for novelty, nor if it will be impervious to cloning. But this app certainly makes one thing clear: contents need to be checked because we’re becoming more mistrusting than ever… Perhaps our eyes have become lazy and need to slow down on this constant flirting with images and, instead, start surveying them from a sensible distance. A bird’s eye view, so to speak. Off we go…

Some are doomed to roam the earth before they find a soul mate with an ideal form, and the following story is all about this. We know that the origins of “All Hallows’ Eve” are to be found in the Celtic pagan tradition: it was believed that on that particular night the souls of the dead were given special permission to re-enter the world of the living which was off-limits to them during the rest of the year. Later came the legend of Stingy Jack, the cunning drunkard who not only bargained with the Devil, but actually managed to trick him. Having made a mockery of both good and evil, neither Heaven nor Hell would ultimately grant Jack entry. That’s why, in order to ward off his restless soul, the Irish would scoop out turnips and carve scary faces out of the rind to expose the hollow interior. But there’s no getting blood (or lore) out of a turnip… Many centuries later, when the Irish immigrated to America they found there a local gourd, the pumpkin, which was chubbier and far more appealing in form than the unassuming European root vegetable. Jack’s ghost had finally found its soul mate: the coupling of Jack and the pumpkin was a mystical marriage because, as we all know, Jack-o’-lantern became the quintessential symbol of Halloween. It may take clever brains to find an ideal form but this tale about a hollow head teaches that one should never underestimate chance encounters either – especially when the luck of the Irish is involved. And the art of marketing will certainly take its hat (or paddy cap) off to such profound wisdom.

The dachshund is a classic example of wishful thinking. Although handbooks tell us that it has a playful temperament, it seems that this is an ‘optional extra’ reserved for close acquaintances only. Indeed the dachsie fancies itself as a guard dog, but its diminutive size isn’t on its side. Talking of sides, the dachshund’s defeat as an elite pet came after World War I. It should be noted that although a symbol of Germany, the breed had become immensely popular in England, having also been Queen Victoria’s favourite doggie. Nevertheless, after the fall of the First Reich, a popular cartoon depicted a dachshund dangling from an enormous English bulldog’s mouth with the caption “Got him!” : there could be few doubts as to who had won the Great War and who had lost, and thus the short-legged hound’s popularity hit rock-bottom. Then came a marketing operation to associate it with the culinary world: what eventually came to be known as the hotdog was originally called the “dachshund sausage” for obvious reasons, although this name soon fell by the wayside and was supplanted by the catchier version. Germany didn’t give in and in 1972 chose “Dackel Waldi” as the mascot of the Munich Olympics – the Games that have gone sadly down in history on account of the tragic events that took place there. Before we take our sock dog apart and put its components back in their drawer, let’s bark back, oops, hark back to the fact that this breed has always distinguished itself as an excellent hunting dog, particularly good at flushing out badgers (hence its name from “Dachs”, German for badger). Neither badgers nor bad news are in scarcity right now, quite the contrary, and while we wish no harm on the musteloid creature in its sett, we would love to badger the “badger hounds” to devote their proverbial doggedness to chasing out the rising mortgages, inflation and energy prices by which we are all currently beset. After all, quite a few burrow-dwelling animals have had their “socks blown off” by these Wiener dogs, as they are sometimes called, who are always hot… on the trail.

Today we’re going to tell you a story about the 8vo (octavo) which was invented thanks to a brilliant paper-folding operation. Our story takes place during the Renaissance: in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg has already printed his Bible while in Italy, in Venice to be precise, there’s a certain printer who is fascinated by the idea that the design is in the message. His name is Aldus Manutius (or, in Italian, Aldo Manuzio) and he’s luring to his ‘Aldine Press’ the top artists and engravers of the day – not to mention philosophers such as Erasmus of Rotterdam. Why? Because he’s in the process of creating a brand new style in reading: the predecessor of the modern paperback. In Germany the printing presses were rolling off books which, albeit modern, seemed tailored for bygone times: bulky tomes that were so hefty they couldn’t be carried around easily. Moreover, their thick Schwabacher typeface certainly did not make Gothic lettering easy on the eye. Manutius’ masterstroke, on the other hand, consisted in his fonts: it was he who inspired Garamond, a font which is so good at hiding discreetly behind the words themselves that continues to be extensively used to this day. Next came the font which, on account of Manutius’ nationality, is called Italic – one of the latter’s many advantages being that it allows more letters to fit onto a page. And then came the 8vo volume, obtained by printing 16 pages of text on a full sheet of paper and folding it 3 times to produce 8 leaves: here then was the ‘mobile’ book which one could finally hold in the palm of one’s hand and take and read anywhere, even in the new worlds that were being discovered. It was nothing short of a revolution, comparable to the one that occurred in recent years when the telephone became… mobile. At any rate, five hundred years on, printing still seems driven by this kind of inspired frugality. Something similar has happened at Bari University’s Faculty of Architecture where a violin has been designed in 3D; thus, thanks to 3D-printing, the string-instrument can be produced in one day at the cost of approximately 100 Euros (as opposed to the 6 months required by a luthier, and a cost well above the thousand mark). Naturally this fiddle can’t compete with the handcrafted instrument but constitutes, nevertheless, an invitation to step inside the world of music without too much fuss or expense. In the very same way that, in spite of their compactness, Manutius’ pocket-size books expanded readers’ horizons, making their world a bigger place. Is our approach to sound about to change? Who knows. However history does teach us the importance of always being, ahem, in tune with the times.

2022 is running along high-voltage cables, yet there was one writer who had no doubts whatsoever that this was going to be a dystopian year: the novel Fahrenheit 451 was written in 1953 and is set at an unspecified time after 2022, in a city which – despite being brightly lit up – is actually a very sad place to live in because the marching orders are to burn all books. Today both the Eiffel Tower and the Mole Antonelliana are having to turn their lights off early so as to save on electricity. Not even science fiction had gone quite so far… Come to think about it, everything our modern culture has accomplished, uninterruptedly since 1900 to date, is based on the glittering hustle and bustle of our cities as they rise higher and higher (see Boccioni’s painting “Città che sale”). Now it appears we are having to slow down a bit and even the world of design is changing accordingly. Nike, for example, is reducing the number of zips and seams on its sports clothes, the brand’s concept for the future being to streamline them more and more, thereby both simplifying its production cycle and cutting back on its energy consumption. Maybe, then, the fact that we have to decrease our volts at the present time isn’t such a bad thing after all: as falling apples (or should we say pears?) hit us on the head, they might indeed light up new ideas in there…

Whereas the adjective “coquettish” comes from the French word for cockerel, the Italian equivalent, “civettuola”, derives from the word for owl. The very sound of it makes one think of a light and swift movement, of the graceful flitting and swooping of a bird that often chooses the world of fashion as its landing pad. Paris Fashion Week came to a close last week. At one particular show, the set recreated a grotto in an Italian garden, reminiscent of the Boboli Gardens in Florence: lots of ‘extremely’ black dresses, embellished with lace galore, strutted on the catwalk. We’re talking about the Dior Show at which designer Maria Grazia Chiuri drew her inspiration from Catherine de’ Medici, the Florentine Queen of France who made waves and caused a huge sensation during the Renaissance. Catherine was responsible for introducing to France items such as forks, platform shoes and lace from the Venetian island of Burano, as well as a certain savoir faire in black. She was in the habit of wearing clothes that were blacker than soot, along with high heels so as to tower above everyone else. It is said that she ordered the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and had poisoned her mother-in-law using a glove laced with poison… finely-manufactured in Florence, of course. Meanwhile, during the same period in Tuscany, Cosimo de’ Medici’s wife Eleanor of Toledo, founded a textile factory and hired the painter Bronzino, who immortalised her in a brocade gown that was the acme of finery, as her publicity artist. It’s quite possible that the sumptuous gown never actually existed, seeing as Bronzino had simply been given a snippet of the fabric to work from. But the portrait sufficed to make the “Eleanor Style” the talk of Europe. With their arsenic and old – or, more likely, new – lace, Catherine and Eleanor were owls, rather than coquettes, sharing with those nocturnal birds (who have always been symbols of foresight) an ability to look beyond. They used to cut their (very fine) coats according to their (very fine) cloth and we can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the long ‘film’ of Italian fashion and style started rolling back in the 16th century .

This week the world’s oldest heart has been found preserved inside a fossilised prehistoric fish. The “ancient” often comes hand-in-hand with the “sacred”, but we must regretfully take note that it is not a human being that holds this particular record. We’re somewhere off the western coast of Australia, the protagonist of our story is a fish, known as the Gogo, that became extinct 380 million years ago. All that remains of this ‘placoderm’ is a fossil… yet its heart is intact. It all makes sense. For our ancestors, sacredness lay at the bottom of the deep blue sea and its awe-inspiring wonders never missed an opportunity to surface, perhaps disguised as art, with poets, artists and sculptors ‘splashing out’ on huge quantities of jellyfish, mermaids (sirens) or tritons. Electric moray eels exerted what one might term as shock fascination: a sort of otherworldly ‘touch-point’, they were bred in pools by the Romans. Not to mention the Koiné word for “fish” which eventually became the acronym for Jesus… In other words, it isn’t solely on terra firma that one finds sacredness. However, as we swim in these times of ours that seem to turn us inside out like a sock, we could at least look a little closer: fish never close their eyes. On the other hand, we humans want blind luck and blindfolded justice – and we enjoy happiness with our eyes shut! Could our mothers have been right when they warned us to keep our eyes wide open? Alertness will keep us afloat.

The tongue ever turns to the aching tooth, so it is said, and the Italian tongue endeavours to satisfy the taste buds of those who expect it to keep up with the times. Being an ‘old’ language, it requires a certain degree of introspection in order to find the right words. In the new Italian Treccani Dictionary, Dizionario della lingua italiana, the synecdoche “Man” (which was previously used collectively) has been replaced with “person” and “human being”. The new gender-sensitive dictionary will be available as from October. Valeria Della Valle and Giuseppe Patota are the two linguists who have been working on this project which also features another major novelty: for the first time gendered names and adjectives are to be listed in strict alphabetical order. In practice, this means that more often than not one will have to search for the feminine form in order to find the masculine, even when the latter has tended to be the umbrella word for both male and female. For example, the word “amico” (friend, noun m.) will come under the dictionary entry “amica” (friend, noun f.), and in order to find “medico” (doctor, noun m.) one will have to search under “medica” (doctor, noun f.), a neologism which with most Italians are still unfamiliar. Italian being a gendered language, all these words have a common prefix, followed by a suffix which changes according to the gender. As usual, we’re relying on an image to help us make our point. If we were to untie this floral knot, what would be left? It will no longer be a calla lily but, on the other hand, it won’t yet be a tie (insofar as it only becomes a tie when you actually tie – or knot – it). We’ve tried to say it with flowers. Language ‘dresses’ thought and, as it changes with the times, so too the budding landscape of human relations is constantly bursting into blossom in a never-ending process of transformation.

Last Wednesday the Mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, flew to Paris to present our city’s bid to host Expo 2030. Since we love challenges, we’ve taken a crack at the subject, and at rousing the media’s interest, with Luca Josi and Antonio Romano’s proposal of erecting a colossus beside the Colosseum. The real name of Italy’s most recognisable monument is in fact the Flavian Amphitheatre, but it came to be known as “Colosseum” for a reason that has largely been forgotten: because of the colossal statue of Nero that stood beside it. A statue of such awesome dimensions that although it hasn’t been there for centuries, its memory lives on in the name of Rome’s iconic landmark. If we think of other ultra-famous landmarks built for events such as this, the one that immediately springs to mind is the icon of France which was designed precisely for the Esposition Universelle of 1889 and named after Gustave Eiffel. Rather than metal, it shares the same symbolic mettle with our Amphitheatre, although its reputation as a work of modern engineering was hard won. Eugène Atget, one of the best photographers of the time, used to avoid it like the plague. In 1893 a cartoon depicted the Eiffel Tower as a “pedestal” for a statue of Victor Hugo; ah, the wretches, les misérables, he might well have exclaimed. As-yet unfocused eyes were perhaps viewing that gateway to the world’s goods, the Expo, as nothing but a heap of iron – which, as such, accomplished exactly what it is was meant to: in other words it became a cosmic magnet attracting attention. A comparison with the Eiffel Tower seems appropriate given that while the English-speaking world knocks on wood, in Rome it’s iron that we touch for good luck. The decision regarding our capital’s bid is expected in November and we are firmly convinced that sometimes, if an idea fits the context, it can become a colossal success.

It’s customary to wish one another bon voyage on the eve of the summer break, yet it’s actually September that brings with it the calendar of engagements, events, and (why not) leisure activities that await us in the “school year” ahead. At this point we can but wish one another the best of luck, or rather fortune, though in a narrow sense. Oh yes, because for our ancestors the meaning of this term was not wedged between the words money, wealth or chance. It was the winds that represented good fortune. Try going to Florence, specifically to the basilica of Santa Maria Novella, and looking up at the entablature on the right-hand side of the façade: this is where the merchant Giovanni Rucellai, a friend of the Medici family as well as a patron of the arts, had Leon Battista Alberti set his coat of arms. It features the billowing “Sails of Fortune”. How does one maintain the desired course when the winds are blowing against us? A sea merchant like Rucellai must have known a thing or two. Rather than the event itself, which may or may not be in our favour, it’s always our response that sets the pace. “Prudence, patience and magnanimity” was the recipe for having the wind in one’s sails and, hence, for smooth sailing. So let’s set sail today, ideally armed with a fountain pen, the white sails being the blank sheets of paper on which we’ll write the stories of the year now in the offing. May the wind always be at our backs!