Inarea

Had we been living in ancient Rome, today would have been a major festivity. The season is inclement (after all, these are the shortest days of the year) and the harvest is meagre. That’s why the period from 17th to 23rd December used to be days of liberty, revelling and topsy-turvy: gifts were exchanged, the masters would prepare banquets for their slaves who were even allowed to play dice (which was not permitted during the rest of the year). Saturn was the god of sowing and so propitiatory processions were organised to ward off dead spirits that might otherwise jinx the harvest. The buzzword was merrymaking galore and, amidst the playing of cymbals and drums, carnival also kicked off. The masks worn had to be ghoulish enough to ward off the wandering spirits. It seems that our ancestors had it down to a fine art to ensure Pandora’s proverbial box wouldn’t get opened up… Name Day St Daniel, Prophet

The above escape took place before the 1962 one immortalised in the Clint Eastwood film. But the two episodes and their outcomes are quite similar: files and sharp objects to pierce the fortress, old tyres used as rafts, no news of the missing fugitives: did they survive among the fogs banks of San Francisco? Who knows, maybe they all went back to school… After all, school is the collective noun used to describe a group of fish swimming together in synchrony and whose only purpose is survival. The fish turn, twist and perform “Cirque du Soleil”-style acrobatics in the water solely to confuse predators. There are no head teachers telling pupils what to do in a school like that – it’s a bit like the relationship that was presumably struck up between the five convicts who planned their escape from the infamous jail. On the other hand, if the five were a motley bunch, theirs is more likely to have been a shoal, rather than a school – a softer-sounding word, to be sure, but with a sharp edge to be found in their wits and tools. Making a getaway is fishy business and no doubt required cutting-edge planning. Alcatraz may not be Devil’s Island, but the Devil is always there, lurking in the details. Name Day St David, King and Prophet

Italo Marchioni was an Italian immigrant who worked on Wall Street – selling ice creams. Although business was tickety-boo, the cups and containers were a problem: when they didn’t get broken by careless customers, they had to be washed… which was a hassle. So, on 15 December 1903, Italo Marchiony (his name had already been Americanised) deposited his patent for moulding apparatuses to be used in the manufacture of ice cream wafer cups. In those days if you heard the word “toot” near an ice cream push cart in Manhattan, it meant that there was an Italian there urging someone to eat up “tutto” (all) his/her ice cream. Marchioni’s edible cups however ended up leaving a somewhat bitter aftertaste in his own mouth. After being awarded the patent, his paternity of the invention was contested in court. No doubt a lot of trial notes, scribbled by many a pettifogger, got crumpled up and thrown into the waste-paper basket: they certainly didn’t make it as design items into the MoMA where, on the other hand, Italo and his cone have conquered a rightful place. Name Day: San Valerian

The first person to sketch the concept for aerostatic navigation actually lived a hundred years earlier: it was in 1670 that a Jesuit priest called Father Francesco Lana devised a vacuum airship that was lighter than air. Fr. Lana wrote that should there be improvements to his intuition, he would be happy to accept them – yet at the same time he hoped God would leave his imagination where it was: what a disturbance the landing of foreigners in city squares would cause! Nor did the Inquisition let him – or a Spanish colleague of his who also tried about a century later – get away with it … “Anyone who is familiar with it will recognize that Mr. Edison’s lightbulb is a clear failure.” These words, spoken in 1880 by Henry Morton, President of the Stevens Institute of Technology, are emblematic of the sort of prejudices inventors often encounter. Here’s how an idea travels through time: everything is fine at take-off, but will the landing be just as smooth? Times must be ripe for ideas to fly. Name Day: St John of the Cross

As we prepare, almost 800 years on, to speak of the life of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, we can’t help thinking of Italian pop idol Lucio Battisti’s song about his clever friend who knew how to fix everything, needing nothing but a screwdriver to work miracles. Frederick was, first and foremost, a genius: he knew how to govern, to plan visionary buildings (suffice it to think of Castel del Monte), to write a treatise on falconry. He avoided falling into traps by practising the savvy art of diplomacy and when he could not avoid honouring his promise to the Pope to go on a crusade, instead of waging war on the Sultan of Egypt, he came to an agreement with him, a feat facilitated by the fact that the Emperor spoke Arabic fluently. Between one negotiation and another, he would spend his time philosophising with Islamic scholars, something much frowned upon by fundamentalists on either side. In any case, during his reign, all Christians were afforded free access to Jerusalem. Not only did Frederick found the “Sicilian School of Poetry”, but he also wrote love poems himself. We could continue by mentioning how, in 1224, he founded the first state university in Naples so as ensure his kingdom would be able to count on an army of jurists (these too, like the friend in the song, would be able to fix anything – albeit in a different way and with different tools). We’ll stop here, though with a flicker of regret. After him, southern Italy has never had such a loving king, one so brilliant, so zesty and so full of beans as Frederick the “Wonder of the World” – which is how this exceptional sovereign was known far and wide. Name Day: St Lucy

If we were to search for one single word to describe Frank Sinatra, it would waft towards us just like the steam rising from the ground in New York. And that word could only be: “American”. Whether his career was an epic or a pastoral, it was marked by that sheer magnitude that is, without the shadow of a doubt, the most ‘frank’ of American characteristics. Baby Sinatra came into the world in December 1915: he was deaf in one ear and the son of Italian immigrants living out in the boonies. Frank’s rise to fame was studded with countless ups and downs, as well as a wide range of genres: from the buoyancy of swing, to the melancholy of balladry. Applying to Sinatra the verses from a famous Italian poem about Napoleon, “He fell, then triumphantly did soar to fall again” …over and over again: after all, he too was of Italian origin. A journalist once wrote in “The New Yorker” that there are “two odd, coinciding figures: Frank and Sinatra”, and “at least two Sinatras—the swinging Sinatra and the sad Sinatra”. And what a surprise it is to discover that “The Voice” was also a painter whose favourite subjects were clowns, those figures that notoriously swing between laughter and tears. Perhaps that’s what he saw when the spotlights were dimmed and he looked at himself in the mirror. Feast Day: Our Lady of Guadalupe

What’s a parenthesis? A means of catching one’s breath from the world or from an overly-long sentence, depending on how you look at it. Quite permissible, as long as it’s a visible suspension: let’s say a break from work or a longed-for weekend. A parenthesis is perfect when it comes to self-management and always knows when it’s time for the sentence to get back on track. During these very days, back in 1956, the Congress of the Italian Communist Party was opening in Rome and Italo Calvino decided not to take part… so he started writing “Il barone rampante” (“The Baron in the Trees”). In the novel, young Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò decides to spend the rest of his life in the trees, far from the world, but not far enough to be estranged from it. And what happens when there is no closing bracket? “And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.” As he looks down on the world with a bird’s eye view, Cosimo finds love. As for us, we’ll never be able to find enough words to thank the author for having opened up his own personal parenthesis at that moment in time: in order to look down on the world during those December days, a pen and an inkpot were all he needed. Name Day: St Damasus I, Pope

In a well-known Italian novel, a certain Professor Bellavista, while giving one of his philosophy classes to his condominium neighbours, explains to them that Mankind is divided in two categories: “men of love” and “men of freedom”. The former prefer having a bath, because it’s a moment when they can let their imagination run free, the latter are in favour of taking a shower because it’s practical, quick and inexpensive. Men of love are endlessly hugging; men of freedom can only tolerate air. Men of freedom prefer Christmas trees, men of love prefer nativity crèches. Having made such a distinction, the novel’s author, Luciano De Crescenzo, divides the Italians – northerners and southerners, with Milan and Naples as their respective capitals – into these two categories. He then goes on to describe a dual Europe, where the art of loving is adopted by the Spaniards, Greeks and Irish, while the philosophy of self-importance is definitely the prerogative of the Scandinavians, Germans and British – the French being split between one side of the fence and the other. But it is a fact that the Neapolitan “suspended coffee” tradition (i.e. consuming a cup of coffee and paying for two so that a hard-on-their-luck customer can be served a coffee for free) has managed to win over also the Lombards, Gauls and Alemanni. Whether one goes north or south, “suspended groceries” are becoming increasingly commonplace, and rumour has even reached us of a suspended baguette tradition. If this means that the frontiers between emotions and cognition have been broken down, then we can safely say that the so-called men of love have transformed Europe into a cocktail in which diversities co-exist side-by-side… a wonderful “suspended world”, one might say. And to think it all started off with a cup of coffee! Name Day: St Maurus

Frozen food existed long before this gentleman came onto the scene, but the quality was so bad that New York State even banned it from its prisons. Clarence Birdseye got his breakthrough idea watching fishermen in Labrador preserving their catch for the winter months: the fish was frozen instantly under thick ice, reaching the required temperature of -40°C. But aside from masterminding the method itself, Birdseye was responsible for the creation of a whole series of allied industries: a large-scale distribution chain and logistics (and the USA is a pretty big country) that took into account the need for refrigerators, speedy deliveries and brand new trade processes. If we think of the quantity (and quality) of frozen foods that fill our stomachs and lives nowadays, this story certainly becomes quite colourful… The green leaves on our fish are a efficacious metaphor of the “evergreen world” that Clarence Birdseye succeeded in imagining and coordinating. Name Day: St Syrus

If one considers that the Church has a history of over 2,000 years, today’s feast day is a relatively recent one: it was instituted by Pope Pius IX only in 1854 and established, once and for all, that the mother of Jesus was conceived without sin. Whatever one’s religion is, this date gets the ‘metronome’ of expectancy ticking away, like a mother-to-be carrying her baby (after all, that is what the young Mary was). Today some of us will start putting up our trees, some will listen to an old “White Christmas” vinyl record, while others will mount a nativity scene, with figurines of shepherds and sheep. The fact is that from today until 25th December, what could be more apt than Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s famous aphorism that awaiting pleasure is itself pleasure? We wish you an pleasurable start to the day: enjoy a moment of leisure as you have your breakfast, relish the unmistakable aroma of your coffee or tea as it wafts through the air… that’s the only way to ensure that the spirit of Christmas never grows cold. Name Day: Sant’Eutychian