Inarea

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

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