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 beyond its niche (Edwardian children’s literature) and gave its name to a condition that is often mentioned in books on psychology, conversations between friends or arguments between lovers: the Peter Pan Syndrome. Yet, we don’t feel we can stigmatise the syndrome entirely seeing that, as was the case for Wendy, it constitutes an ingredient for making up fairy stories. Even though in the end the young lady concluded that growing up wasn’t so bad after all, and consequently decided to leave Neverland, she took with her a bottle of something similar to pixie dust: imagination. To be sprinkled generously to ensure that one continues to believe in fairies. Name Day: St John the Apostle

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 dinner, it’s quite amazing to discover that he used to work distributing food to the poor from the kitchens of Jerusalem. So, if yesterday’s light came to fill the hearts of people, this young man was the first to roll up his sleeves to keep that light burning. Alas, it’s a story that doesn’t have a happy ending. Yet at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan we came across a painting where Stephen is holding a palm, symbolising his martyrdom, from which the bud of a new fruit seems to be sprouting. Whether one is a believer or not, the message inherent to this image is quite clear. As for us, we can always use some delicious ‘first fruits’ for our Christmas decorations. Name Day:St Stephen

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 in words. Maybe that’s why in the Gospel According to St Luke we are told that Mary preferred to stay silent and that she “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” These days are often referred to as days of waste, yet today we will have a surplus of light with us. So what are we going to do with it? Our wish is to get a chance to share it with someone like Italian poet Ungaretti who writes that he prefers to be on his own, with his fireside’s “four somersaults of smoke”. And who knows, maybe tomorrow all our problems will have been miraculously untangled. We wish you a merry Christmas, from the bottom of our hearts. Name Day:St Anastasia

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 Adams in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Adams’ pungent wit serves to remind us that there is someone in a state of trepidation, and that ‘someone’ is none other than Mr Stomach who knows full well that a tour de force is about to begin shortly and that it can be expected to carry on until January 6th. Perhaps he wishes that, at least on Christmas Eve, we could go back to our grandparents’ sensible habit. With that in mind, the very least we can do is to dedicate some raw vegetables to Mr S – Christmas style, of course. Name Day: St Irma

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 never easy to settle into a new city and when Peggy arrived in Venice in 1946, she walked right into a café and asked where she could go to make new acquaintances: namely, artists, critics, and people with whom to talk about her art collection (in Paris, before the War, she had been known as the lady who used to buy one painting a day). Someone scribbled the name Emilio Vedova on a box of matches, together with the address of a trattoria called “Angelo”, behind St Mark’s Square. Off she went… and indeed found Emilio and Venice’s entire artistic circle there (the abstract one, to be precise). Although many years have gone by, in our mind’s eye we can still see the scene: they’re all sitting there around the table, amidst the clinking of glasses and the bartering of paintings and unpaid meals (the legend goes that the first time an artist paid his bill with a banknote, it was framed). Naturally, all this is going on under the vigil, bespectacled eyes of the Last Dogaressa. Name Day:St John Cantius

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 the season’s festivities with Christmas tree fires and other such calamities. The man who saved the day was Thomas Edison’s ‘loyal lieutenant’, Edward H. Johnson: on 22 December 1882 he wired a string of coloured light bulbs on 36th Street. It was something of a miracle, an almost uncanny apparition in the night. Unlike wax, however, electricity was still expensive and a few years had to go by before other streets could also afford to follow suit. Nowadays, Christmas lights have a tendency to stay on even after the holidays: indeed, there have been sightings of them as late as Easter. Candle wax has waned, rather than waxed, while our strings of Christmas lights just keep getting longer and longer and longer. Name Day: St Frances Xavier Cabrini

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 evokes the glint of weapons. It even seems strange to us that white should be associated with the day that, in terms of sunlight, is the stingiest of the year: if we wanted to feast on the sun, then 21st December would be a pretty frugal meal. But like “Ground Zero”, white is also the colour of beginnings, even of small, everyday ones. Mischievously blinking at us all through the longest night of the year, our little white owl is made of everything we need to prepare for our first meal of the day. Beginnings are always exciting and what better way to start – at least the day – than with a hearty breakfast? So, have yourself a very merry breakfast and a happy (new) winter. Name Day St Peter Canisius

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 Russian scholar Vladimir Propp who sifted through a hundred European and American fairy tales and found thirty-one archetypes common to them all. One of these is that of a hero, alone in a forest, who comes upon a house with chicken legs. Strange as it may seem, even in our everyday life we sometimes come across landmarks that indicate gateways towards a middle earth: in Rome, for example, a monster guards a cavern, as it were: in fact, it’s actually a library (the Bibliotheca Hertziana, an ‘otherworld’ if ever there was one). And, getting back to houses on the edge of forests, there’s one in a well-known TV drama fiction that turns out to be a portal to “the Upside Down” (“Stranger Things”, 2016). Looking at even more mundane aspects of everyday life, is there something in our own homes that has the makings of a fairy tale? An item that fits like a glove, perhaps (though it may not necessarily lay the proverbial golden eggs)? Name Day St Philogonius

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 telling the story of Mr Scrooge the miser, who had to take a journey through time with three Christmas spirits (the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come) in order to understand that it was time for him to turn over a new leaf… If one reads between the lines, the moral of this story is that we ought to keep our Christmas spirit (i.e. kindness and good resolutions) well beyond the holiday period. The big question, though, is whether we can work at overcoming our capital vices or whether these are part of our primitive cerebral cortex (i.e. where our primal impulses reside), which neuroscientist Donald MacLean defined as “the lizard brain” in the 1970s. There are twelve days of Christmas and a whole year to test this, and cash in… so let’s start now. Name Day St Urban V, Pope

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 Cremonensis Faciebat” which is, to this day, a sign of their preciousness. Talking about love, Mozart’s own affections for the violin were somewhat ambiguous. It was the instrument his father played but the relationship between the two of them wasn’t exactly idyllic. In his “Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra”, the viola is tuned a semitone higher leaving the violin to play in flat (a semitone lower); this, perhaps, speaks for itself, over and above any rational explanation. And, fast-forward to the 1920s, what can one say about when Man Ray transformed his beloved Kiki’s body into a violin by drawing on the curvy French model’s back a pair of ‘f-holes’, i.e. the soundholes that Stradivari cut into the front of his violins? Love did have something to do with this: Man Ray’s photograph is entitled “Ingres’s Violin” as it seems that the eponymous painter adored this musical instrument. After all, ambiguity was the hallmark of Surrealism, a movement that continues to fascinate precisely because it isn’t straight – just like the French curves that our own violin is made of. Name Day St Malachy, Prophet