Here is something I did not plan. I have just come out of Turin, and Turin only became the Savoy capital in 1563, when the family packed up their court and moved it there. Moved it from here. So I have followed a royal house backwards, four hundred and some years in one afternoon, and nobody checked my ticket for that. Chambéry does not shout about it either. I dropped the bags at a flat in the old town, walked one street, and there it was: French flags and the red and white cross of Savoy strung up together over the road, and a mountain sitting at the end of it like it had been waiting.
First French lunch of the trip and I got a bit emotional about it, which is embarrassing but true. Two weeks of Italy and then somebody hands you a plate with a soft egg on it, avocado, hazelnuts, a scatter of leaves and one small purple violet sitting right in the middle. A flower. On my lunch. I photographed it, felt silly, photographed it again.
Then into the old lanes behind the castle and the whole town goes quiet on you. Tall walls, shutters closed against the heat, one banner hanging down the middle with a white eagle on it, and nothing moving at all. The light only gets about a third of the way down before it gives up. That is the whole drawing, and I did not have to arrange a thing.
The cross keeps turning up. Red field, white cross, hung off a wire against a yellow wall with grey shutters, and it has been the mark of Savoy since the Middle Ages. What I did not know until I stood under the castle here is how recent the rest of it is. Savoy voted to join France in April 1860, and the act of annexation was signed in the castle in this town on 14 June that year. Everything I have walked through since Turin was one family’s back yard, and it only stopped being that a hundred and sixty six years ago.
I shoot a lot of this trip in black and white, and Chambéry hands it over without being asked. Rough stone, a rendered wall going soft at the corner, one bright arch at the bottom of a stair with a passage running away behind it. There is a person down there in the light, tiny, about four brushstrokes worth. That is all a figure needs to be sometimes.
And then I worked out what this place actually does. The old town is stitched together with allées, passages cut straight through the buildings that link one street to the next and open out into courtyards along the way. They put you in mind of the traboules in Lyon, though these have their own feel, lower and rougher, and a lot of them were once part of the private houses of Savoyard families. You step off a sunny street into a cold stone tunnel, and forty seconds later you are somewhere else entirely, with bins and washing and a bit of sky.
One of those passages spat me out beside a little gallery, and I stood there with my mouth open. Ceramic figures hung on wires off the ceiling, all of them caught mid air. A girl in a blue dress with wings, flying flat out. A lamb with its legs stretched. Two heads asleep on rough clay clouds. No plinths, no glass, just a white wall and a lot of empty space around each one. That is exactly the problem I have been chewing on since the Biennale. How much can you take away and still have the movement read? These take away nearly everything and it still reads.
Around the corner from that, a glass door under a sign reading La Traboule, depuis 1975, with entrée libre written on a bit of paper stuck to the glass and pictures hanging inside a stone passage. The cathedral door was reflected in the glass behind me while I took it. A gallery inside a passage, named after the passage. I like this town already and I have been here five hours.
So the working list for this stop is written. The big Saturday market tomorrow, for movement and crowds and how people stand when they are choosing peaches. Then a proper gallery walk on Sunday, a commercial one, an artist run one and the big institutional one, to see the same work priced and hung three different ways. The iPad and the cards are in the bag as always. Tonight though, I am done. Bags in a corner, shoes off, and a town that keeps folding itself in half. More soon.
Saturday in Chambéry. Four cast iron elephants with no back ends, a cathedral ceiling that only pretends to be carved stone, and an afternoon in the square drawing two blokes and a dog that had given up on the heat.
A morning behind the Royal Palace with the squirrels and a marble head wearing a pigeon, then down to Piazza San Carlo, where half the galleries were shut for August and one show stopped me dead.
I could not sleep, so I walked Turin awake. A Roman gate at first light, a mad stone dome, the Mole up close, the river holding a bridge upside down, and my favourite thing in the whole city, a little green bull that spits cold water.
