Imaginarea Daily

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

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