Saturday is market day here, eight in the morning until one, so I was out early with the good intentions of a woman who has not had coffee yet. And I got about two hundred metres. There is a little carousel parked near the top of the street, closed, no music, wooden horses stopped dead mid gallop with their front hooves still up. Behind them, framed right through the gap between two of them, four elephants. I stood there like a goose.
The elephants are the town’s own joke on itself. The fountain went up in 1838, designed by Pierre-Victor Sappey of Grenoble, and the four beasts are joined at the rump so you only ever see their front halves. Chambéry calls them les quatre sans cul, the four without backsides. They are there for General Benoît de Boigne, a local boy who went off to India, came back with a fortune, and spent a pile of it on the town. He paid for the arcaded street they stand at the end of too, three hundred thousand livres handed over in 1822, built between 1824 and 1830. Turin style arcades, and I have just come from Turin. It all keeps rhyming.
Then the cathedral, and this is the one I am still thinking about. You walk in, you look up, and there is the most extraordinary flamboyant Gothic ceiling, stone tracery curling everywhere with dark blue sky showing through the gaps. Except none of it is carved. It is paint. All of it. Casimir Vicario covered the walls and vaults in trompe-l’oeil in 1834 and 1835, and the whole ensemble runs to about six thousand square metres, the biggest painted illusion of its kind in Europe. Six thousand. I have painted a background or two in my time and I felt very small in there.
Stand back from it and the trick gets even better, because at full height your eye simply gives up arguing and accepts the lot as stone. Empty chairs all the way down, three chandeliers hanging on wires so thin they disappear, a gold cross catching the only warm light in the building. Nobody in there but me and a cleaner somewhere behind a pillar. If you took the colour out it would be pure ink work, verticals and a few hard darks, and I very nearly did.
By the time I came back to the square in the afternoon the market had long packed up and the heat had won. So I did the thing I actually came to Europe to do, which is sit still and draw people who have no idea. Two blokes standing about, one deep in his phone, one smoking, both of them completely stationary. And underneath them, flat out in the hard shadow, the shaggiest dog in Savoie. He never moved once. Best model I have had all trip.
Afterwards I ducked through one of the passages off the arcades and landed in somebody’s courtyard, the way you do here. Cobbles, ferns in pots, a stack of pallets, shutters open on the first floor, and standing in the middle of all of it a big steel sculpture in red and black, curved like a shell or a sail depending on where you put your feet. No sign, no label, no fuss. Somebody just put it there and got on with their day. I love that this town does not explain itself.
Last one of the day, and my favourite. An old stone stairwell, and I hung over the rail and shot straight down it. Wrought iron balustrade going round and round, cast into leaves and scrolls, then flight after flight of worn steps folding away underneath until it is just a small pale square at the bottom. Perspective doing all the work for free. That is a drawing I will have to fight, and I am looking forward to it.
Tomorrow is the proper working day. Three galleries in one walk, a commercial one, an artist run one and the big institutional one, so I can see how the same sort of work gets hung and priced three completely different ways. Cards and the iPad are in the bag, as always. Tonight it is cold water and feet up. More soon.
Out of Italy and into Savoy, where the flags change but the white cross does not. A first afternoon in Chambéry, the capital Turin replaced, full of shuttered lanes and passages that go straight through the buildings.
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.
