Inarea In “Peter Pan” a crocodile has swallowed Captain Hook’s clock. That’s not going to happen to our clock, so let’s give ourselves five minutes to take a quick trip to “Neverland”… Time has certainly ticked by since J.M. Barrie’s play debuted at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London: a huge success that stretched way … Read more
Holidays often mean outings and so, should you go visiting churches and museums, you might well come across images of St Stephen: you’ll know it’s him because he’ll be holding a stone. He is venerated as the protomartyr of Christianity, and on the day when we often need to beef up the leftovers of yesterday’s … Read more
On any day of the year, anyone who looks into a cradle basks in reflected glory. Correggio and Jacopo Bassano knew this very well, having depicted exactly this state in all their nativity scenes. We could mention thousands of paintings where the shepherds’ faces are illuminated by a shining light that cannot quite be expressed … Read more
In our grandparents’ days, we Italians were used to observing a strict fast on Christmas Eve. Nowadays, instead, frugality has been left down in the cellar while upstairs in the kitchen everyone is waiting eagerly to tuck in to a Pantagruelian feast. “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk? Ask a glass of water!” writes Douglas … Read more
Had you been walking around Venice just a few decades ago, Peggy Guggenheim in a gondola would have been a familiar sight. Two distinctive signs would have given her away: her lap dogs and those butterfly-shaped glasses of hers which had been specially designed for the famous American ‘art addict’ by artist Edward Melcarth. It’s … Read more
December means Christmas and Christmas means lights; therefore, lights are Christmas. There’s nothing like a little syllogism to remind us of how consubstantial lights are to this time of the year. From a historical point of view, they arrived on the scene at exactly the right moment in time because wax and candles risked ruining … Read more
Let’s imagine a winter without the usual Christmas tones: if you close your eyes, what would be the first colour that comes to mind? To be quite candid, there can be few doubts. The glare of a snow-covered landscape can make us blink, and this verb comes from the Old High German word “blank” which … Read more
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s fairy tales really have very little in common with the renditions of them produced many years later by Walt Disney. In fact, their glossary of images was, one might say, decidedly “grim”: this was because they were what remained of very ancient initiation rites. The first to discover this was the … Read more
This book was written by Charles Dickens in just a few weeks and soon became synonymous with Christmas. To the point that when the author died in 1870, a little girl asked if that meant Father Christmas had also died. A question of transitive property, which is exactly what the author hoped to inspire by … Read more
Antonio Stradivari’s early violins were called “amatizzati” but that had nothing to do with the Italian word for love, “amore”; it was simply that at the time he was apprenticed to master luthier Nicola Amati. It was only when the latter died that Antonio was able to sign his violins with the famous “Antonius Stradivarius … Read more
