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Nov
29
Trieste
  • Posted By : Steve Spicer/
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Your parents die. The children leave home. Friends drift away. These are only some of the advantages of getting older.

But another advantage is getting invitations to events where youth and innocence would be disqualifications. One such was the recent Lamborghini Concorso d’Eleganza in Trieste.

Lamborghini is the great pretender among Italian sportscars. Ferrari is aristocratic and fine while the interloper Lamborghini takes excess to excess and to kitsch and beyond. But since it was acquired by Audi in 1998, a stern Germanic structure is beneath the extravagant Italian costume.

In this way, being driven around Trieste in a new Lamborghini Urus, an enormous four-wheel-drive evidently inspired by a wrestling match between a shark and Fireball XL5, was an automobile synopsis of the region itself where Italian and Austro-German (as well as Slovenian) cultures compete for attention.

Trieste became a free-port in 1719 and got rich from Baron Bruck’s busy Austrian-Lloyd shipping line. It has always been cosmopolitan, but factionalised too. The explorer and orientalist Richard Burton was British consul here in the late nineteenth century. His wife, Lady Burton, was amused by the local distinctions in character and motivation: “If an Austrian gave a ball, the Italian threw a bomb into it.” Jan Morris was moved to wistful elegy, writing of Baron Bruck’s “silken and epauletted passengers” who have now vanished.

After Hitler’s War, Trieste was a “Stato Topolino”, a Mickey Mouse of a place. It is now a part of Italy, if an equivocal one. Frontiers often amplify the national characteristics of opposing nations, as they do between, say, France and Belgium, but here they seem blurred. Venice is only an hour and a half away by frantic autostrada, but a world apart. Moreover, this is Trst. Why? Because Slovenian is at least as obvious here as Italian and its a language with a peculiar disdain for vowels. Or vwls.

You drop with relief off the autostrada and drive to Trieste itself along a fine coastal road with the Adriatic on one side and the karst on another: this is the limestone plateau which defines the area and reaches the sea in a dramatic craggy cliff. “Why not krst?” I wondered.

Because of its unique location, the area has always attracted extreme characters…. Dante, Winckelmann, Stendhal, Richard Burton himself, d’Annunzio, Freud, Rilke and James Joyce. Dante was on his travels and stayed at Duino castle, Winckelmann created modern art history, Burton published his translation of the Kama Sutra while here, d’Annunzio (a “cad” according to E.M. Forster) used the area a base for his quixotic nationalist air and motor-boat raids, Freud came here to study the sexual activity of eels, Rilke turned fret into one of the twentieth century’s greatest poems and while it was in Trieste that Joyce, pausing between booze and hookers, wrote one of the twentieth century’s greatest novels.

For anecdote and comment, there’s a lot to choose from here, but it’s Winckelmann, Rilke and Joyce who, for the visitor, are outstanding in the cntxt of Trst.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann was an itinerant librarian of genius whose Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art) of 1764 became the very first systematic work of art history. Travelling between Rome and Munich, he was murdered in his bed in Trieste’s Locanda Grande in 1768. Winckelmann’s appreciation of classical statuary was at least as associatively carnal as it was directly aesthetic and it’s fair to guess that the circumstances of his demise were a homosexual squabble as much as robbery.

Now his cenotaph is a dignified and perfect neo-classical temple in what, since 1843, has been the Orto Lapidario (Sculpture Garden): a haunting collection of huge antique fragments collected by Winckelmann and lugged by mule from Rome. It sits in the shadow of the Romanesque cathedral of San Giusto, Trieste’s outstanding monument. Ignored by contemporary tourists, the garden’s present scruffy neglect simply enhances its curious beauty.

Rilke was a guest of Marie von Thurn und Taxis in the family castle at Duino in 1912, a few kilometres north of the centre. The vicious bora was blowing. Sometimes, locals still tell you, it blows so hard it can knock you over. And one day the agitated Rilke was standing two hundred feet above rocks with crashing waves below, contemplating an annoying letter from his publisher. And then he was visited by an inspirational angel who blew him over. He wrote, unforgettably :

”Wer, wenn ich schrie, hoerte nich den aus der Engel/Ordnungen ?”. (Who, when I cry out, hears me from the ranks of the angels ?)

The Duino Elegies, for which the term angst might have been coined, were published ten years later.

Joyce arrived in Trieste in 1904. His regime was less one of angst and more one of bars and brothels, the one inevitably leading to the other. He ate a pastry called presnitz – figs, nuts and rum coiled into an intestinal shape – and drank red wine for breakfast. Later, he began a course of the prescription drug Galyl, a toxic combination of sulphur and arsenic. The Harvard academic Kevin Birmingham says this was a treatment for the syphilis Joyce contracted in 1907. Failing eyesight, ulcers and boils, all treated by a long-suffering local doctor, being the symptoms. Discomfort can be a stimulus to genius.

There is one grand hotel in Trieste, the Duchi d’Aosta. And Harry’s is the grand caffe-ristorante on its ground-floor. It has the best view of Piazza Unita d’Italia, which happens to be the largest square in Italy facing the sea, so there is a happy metaphor. But Joyce knew nothing of Harry’s: it only opened in 1972, a branch of the Cipriani family’s original Harry’s Bar in Venice where they invented bellinis and carpaccio. You can eat well. Indeed so well that Michelin gives Harry’s a star, but no-one goes to Trieste for the food.

You might go, instead, for coffee which is a matter of special local pride. Trieste is the home of Illy and latest figures suggest twice as much coffee is drunk here than in any other Italian city. Food no, but you certainly go for atmosphere. At the Antico Caffe San Marco, Joyce used to loiter between brothel and desk. The atmosphere is more Central European than Italian, emphasised by half the space being given to a bookshop. Emphasised even more when a gent wearing full tracht, Austrian folkloric costume, bustled in, a stein dangling from his braces. It could also be emphasised by explaining presnitz comes from a place called Kostanjevica Krasu. I could not find any on the San Marco menu, but you can eat ombolo which is a dish of cured quails eggs with caramelised onions.

A French author says the name of the city sounds like ‘sadness’. Certainly, I would not go to Trieste for a holiday, but a weekend is engaging. On this occasion, I chose not a grand hotel, but Portopiccolo, a resort in Duino-Aurisina, or, if you prefer, Devin Nabrezina. Take it as praise or condemnation, but this is an Italian Port Grimaud. Or perhaps a Slovenian Portmeirion. A developer’s ambitious project of seven years, its Falisia hotel is comfortable in a five star airport hotel fashion with very swish underground parking. And the views over Duino and the Golfo di Trieste are beautiful.

I wonder if thinking of getting older is a Triestino thing. Certainly, Jan Morris said the city is “organically inclined towards neurosis”. Significantly, there are few modern buildings here, excepting the fascist-flavoured Sala Tripcovich, now a theatre on the waterside. When he was a foreign correspondent in Trieste during the late seventies, Richard Bassett noted how difficult it was to meet young people, something charmingly recorded in his fine book Last Days in Old Europe.

Something about the city invites contemplation. Italo Svevo was the marine varnish manufacturer who befriended Joyce and, with the Irishman’s encouragement, became a great writer himself. Svevo’s birth-name was Schmitz who became Joyce’s model for Leopold Bloom: he was one of the “enlightened and hospitable Hebrews” described by Richard Burton. Svevo’s Senilita of 1898 became a Penguin Classic titled As a Man Grows Older. A narrative of senility is Trieste’s great native book.

Every commentator on Trieste is struck by its peculiar sense of dislocation, even sadness. Svevo’s biographer, P.N. Furbank noted how the city had acquired a reputation for suicide. Jan Morris thought of it as nowhere. Certainly, there is a sense of absence and loss. But also of space and opportunity. To my mind, the vastness of the Piazza Unita d’Italia prompted Joyce, along with the red wine and syphilis, to compose his enormous book some of whose sentences exceed three thousand words.

If you think you know Italy, Trieste is an eye-opener. Remarkable. Vienna-on-Sea, they used to call it. But as Italo Svevo knew: “You see things less clearly when you open your eyes too wide”.

(This article originally appeared in The Oldie | Photo by Kevin on Unsplash)

Nov
27
Let’s put the fantasy back into travel
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Who was not impressed by recent photos of a Japanese artist – known in rough translation as Naughty Girl – sitting in a bright yellow plastic kayak whose design was, and there is no way of avoiding saying this, based on a detailed model of her vagina? To my mind, kayaking is quite dangerous enough without the added existential horror of sitting inside a giant, 3-D printed impression of the body part which Gustave Courbet described as “l’origine du monde”.

This started me thinking about symbolism in transport design. The Jaguar E-type is always claimed to be phallomorphic, but I think it is essentially more feminine in shape. Trains can be symbolic too. On our recent trip to Japan, my wife and I debated whether the Shinkansen was more like a serpent, a squid, or an enraged samurai.

Symbolism is the transaction of one thing suggesting another. So it’s specially appropriate in any discussion of leisure travel where very little is ever exactly as it seems. Instead, whatever type of leisure interests us, I am convinced that the prime mover is our appetite for fictions and narrative.

The deceptively simple question “Why do we travel?” was up for a debate at a recent meeting of the Independent Transport Commission. I was one of the debaters. Although I travel a lot, I wanted to argue that incentives for travel are diminishing as globalisation forces a lowering homogeneity in most of our experiences. My counterpart was the Oxford biochemist, Charles Pasternak, a nephew of the author of Dr Zhivago.

Our venue was Rem Koolhaas’s new HQ for Rothschild in the City of London. Vast windows frame enormous views: the power stations of global capitalism soar up in the foreground. We could see jets leaving City Airport and others approaching Heathrow. From this perspective, the answer to the debate’s question could only have been “to stuff your boots with money”.

But we were more sophisticated. Using data and maps of dispersion patterns from the Rift Valley, the elegant Dr Pasternak argued that travel is inspired by an innate “curiosity” that is a defining characteristic of humanity. Only when we got off our simian butts, left the cave and went exploring, were we on the path to inventing Pringles and the internet.

I said, perhaps a little more glumly, that my experience of Prague on a Friday night – with Wenceslas Square full of beer-swilling oiks – did not persuade me that intellectual curiosity was the motivation for being there.

The Permanent Secretary boldly attempted a summing-up of extreme positions. There was Dr Pasternak’s benign insistence on the right to explore. There was my more nuanced case that because we are able to move large numbers of people from one place to the next, does not necessarily mean it’s a good thing to do so.

I adore travel, but I don’t think “curiosity” is its most important factor. Instead, I think it is fantasy. Much enchantment has been drained from the travelling experience. I wish there were more dreams and more surprises (of the amusing sort). This is why Naughty Girl’s canoe was so arresting.

This article originally appeared in The Independent

close up of Giles Gilbert Scott Design for the K6 telephone kiosk, celebrating the Silver Jubilee of George V, 1935.
Nov
26
On Giles Gilbert Scott’s Telephone Kiosk
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The great mysteries are not the invisible things, but the visible ones. And to me, it is a great and fascinating mystery that the same architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, designed one of the world’s most awe-inspiring large buildings and one of its most exquisite small ones: Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral and the General Post Office’s ‘K2’ telephone box.

I grew up in Liverpool and became familiar with the shiver of horror always caused by the sublime cathedral on its vertiginous mount above a macabre canyon of catacombs and monuments. There was a more obvious connection with death than the afterlife. Here you found the Huskisson Memorial, named for the local MP who was the first-ever victim of a train crash. Unfamiliar with speed, he had stuck his head out of the carriage window. And there was also John Foster Junior’s souvenir of his Grand Tour inspired by the Temple of Apollo at Bassae which, translated to Liverpool, became a mortuary chapel. More recently, a contemporary of mine from school, who had become a successful solicitor, threw himself off the Cathedral’s forbidding and dreadful tower.

And so I wonder if mortal thoughts were on Scott’s mind when he won the Royal Fine Art Commission’s 1924 competition for the design of the nation’s phone box. He had recently become a trustee of Sir John Soane’s Museum, itself a place whose single-most outstanding exhibit is Seti’s morbidly fascinating Sarcophagus, a container for a corpse. And in his design for the GPO, Scott was clearly inspired by Soane’s own mausoleum in the Old Church Yard of St Pancras’ church in London. The distinctive summit of the phone box with its composition of segments is a clear reference to the pendentives and tympana of the Mausoleum’s depressed dome.

Read the full article at Drawing Matter

Stephen Bayley 'A war against branding is a war against people' – Dezeen
Oct
17
A war against branding is a war against people
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The old media are dead or dying. Display advertising in newspapers will soon disappear. Maybe newspapers themselves will disappear first. Shops may soon also become things of the past, as e-commerce makes the park-and-ride, pay-and-display, out-of-town superstore look as quaint as the high street once did. Certainly, we no longer have a single producer-consumer axis, but many.

Producer-consumer axes may change, multiply, mutate, morph and evolve, but people are still motivated by desire and magic, by the promises that brands offer, the stories they tell, the secrets they share and the ambitions they excite. Your smartphone tells the time with GPS accuracy, yet you still want an Audemars Piguet, Hublot, Richard Mille, Patek Philippe or a Rolex. Don’t you?

Nietzsche said all of life is a question of taste. And he was right: the choices we make define us. Our possessions define us and sometimes they betray us. Even refusing to make a choice is an irrefragable statement of intent.

Read the full article at Dezeen

Stephen Bayley 'Brexit Has Weakened Britain' featured image
Jul
04
Brexit has weakened Britain
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As an olive oil, and not a lard man, I woke-up on 24 June and thought ‘Bonjour, tristesse’. Then I slept on it, woke up on 25 June and thought of John Milton. The blind poet once dreamt that his sight was restored and his dead wife was alive. And he woke up to find himself still a blind widower. Brexit was like that for me: a bad dream that did not disperse with the dawn.

It’s very sad. There’s a marvellously untranslatable German word Sehnsucht, which suggests that feeling of otherness sometimes felt in places or before works of art. A state-of-mind that is felt mostly as a vague, but perplexing, sense of loss. With Brexit, there’s a bittersweet, I am sorry I really mean agro-dolce, feeling that we have uninvited ourselves from the best party on the bloc.

Read the full feature at Management Today

Stephen Bayley 'How Madrid became the most exciting place to eat in Europe' featured image
Feb
22
How Madrid became the most exciting place to eat in Europe
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Madrid is a city I first discovered as a student. Franco was in power (just), black widows skulked the smartest barrios and the regular taxicab from the airport was a black and chrome rococo Fiat 2300.

But if, like me, you went by rail, the journey could take three days. The tilting train was an eccentric design by Alejandro Goicoechea and José Luis Oriol. The Talgo (for Tren Articolado Ligero Goicoechea Oriol) made only fitful progress. I described the pleasures (hard bread rolls, jamón, wine) and pains (heat, dust and ennui) of the journey from Irun to the capital in an essay competition and won the prize of a year’s supply of Carlsberg Special. That was the first time I profited from writing – so, on the whole, I have fond feelings towards the city.

Read the full feature on The Telegraph

Stephen Bayley 'Donald Trump's interiors: make America crass again' featured image
Dec
10
Donald Trump’s interiors: make America crass again
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Elsie de Wolfe was the pioneer interior designer whose motto was ‘plenty of optimism and white paint’. She banished brown Victoriana from America. And her work on Henry Clay Frick’s private apartments introduced new American money to old French furniture.

If only she were with us today. For his first television interview as president-elect, Donald Trump appeared, imperiously, sitting on a golden throne in the style of Louis Quinze. My vision may well have been blurred by circumstances beyond, but I think there were period-incorrect wall and ceiling paintings on classical-allegorical themes in the background. All of this on cantilevered decks behind mirrored glass about 200 metres above Fifth Avenue.

The French invented the notion of ‘bon goût’, so they also invented the notion of ‘mauvais goût’. Good taste may be indefinitely debatable, but surely it has something to do with manners? And bad taste with appropriateness?

Read the full article at The Spectator

Stephen Bayley 'Good riddance to Nicholas Serota' featured image
Sep
24
Good riddance to Nicholas Serota
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In this week of toadying obsequies after the (rather late) retirement of Sir Nicholas Serota from his imperial throne at Tate, an alternative narrative (briefly) enters the minds of the mischievous.

Alone, aloof, fastidious, austere, he is sitting, suited darkly, in his office surveying, with a basilisk stare, the spreadsheets and data-sets his cowering elfin helpmeets have presented him. They step backwards towards the door bowing, afraid to meet his eyes, as he shoots freezing glances towards them. His lips soon purse in cool satisfaction. He is maybe even stroking a furry white cat. Or perhaps a PVC balloon pussy by Jeff Koons.

The numbers on his spreadsheets are all about attendances. And they are big numbers. Sir Nicholas — ‘Nick’ to his chums — is, or was, the great cham of the new museum religion. Here, an article of faith is that ever-higher attendances are the surest test of value. Success is a calculus of footfall. All of them, these acolytes of the museum faith, default to new building projects as a device to lure and secure more visitors. Nick has created more new buildings than most. The crowds, not the content, make you credible, at least so far as the DCMS is concerned.

Read the complete article at The Spectator

Stephen Bayley 'Is Instagram the death or saviour of photography?' featured image
Aug
22
Is Instagram the death or saviour of photography?
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It’s not that Instagram has changed photography in the way the invention of photography changed painting in the 19th century. It’s more radical than that.

The photo-sharing network has actually become photography. Launched in 2010 as a free mobile app, Instagram now has over 500 million users a month and is estimated to be worth over $30 billion.

It gives the world’s two billion smartphone users access to a global marketplace of imagery. Photography is no longer the province of professionals. Nor are family snaps consigned to neglected memorial albums. After nearly 200 years, photography is realising its potential. If you wanted an example of disruptive technology, here it is. We’re all photographers and curators now.

Read the full feature on The Telegraph

Stephen Bayley 'How the Design Museum lost its way, by co-founder Stephen Bayley' featured image
Aug
13
How the Design Museum lost its way
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Threnody. Dirge. Lament. Epitaph. Elegy. Wake. There are so many English terms to describe the passing of people and things that you wonder if introspection about demise might be a national characteristic. All these words are on my (doggedly cheerful) mind as staff have moved out of London’s Design Museum, securing the last open door with a padlock on 30 June and leaving inside cavernous spaces with rusting memories of designer people and designer things.

So what was the old Design Museum? It arose from a conversation between Terence Conran and me in 1978. He was the proprietor of Habitat, whose decent, modern merchandise revolutionised popular taste, and I was the author of a book about design he had just discovered. He was about to revolutionise me by asking for help to make something that would be as useful to contemporary students, from the point of view of inspiration, as the old V&A had once been to him.

Our prospectus began with a series of popular exhibitions in that august old museum and then we built a spiffy new one of our own. Mrs Thatcher opened it in August 1989 at Butler’s Wharf, just southeast of Tower Bridge. At the time, the glorious view of the City included only Seifert’s NatWest Tower as a punctuation mark on the horizon. Two year’s after Big Bang, the mood was still very Eighties. And so, too, I now see, was the character of the Design Museum.

Read the full article at The Spectator

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