In 1606 the Duke of Savoy told everybody who owned a building in the middle of Turin that they had to put a portico on the ground floor. Not suggested. Required.
Four centuries later the middle of this city has about eighteen kilometres of covered footpath, twelve and a half of it joined up, and you can cross most of Turin in the rain without ever getting wet.
I shot this one in black and white on purpose, which I hardly ever do, because there was no colour in it worth keeping and an enormous amount of drawing. Look at that floor. Bands of dark and pale marble running straight at you and getting tighter as they go, the arches repeating overhead, the lanterns marking off the distance like a metronome.
And then a dog wanders into the far end and the whole thing has a subject.
Hanging under those arches, this. Harry Gruyaert, retrospective, at CAMERA, on until the fourth of October, and it is the first big Italian show he has had.
Belgian, born 1941, Magnum. In the seventies and eighties he was one of the people who dragged colour photography out of being a nice way to describe things and made it the whole point of the picture. Not colour as information. Colour as the reason you are looking.
I did not go in. My legs had already made a decision by then and the show runs until October, which is longer than I have. Writing it here so I stop pretending I will not think about it again.
Further along, an antiquarian bookseller. Vellum and tooled leather, a couple of volumes lying open at their title pages with engravings on them, all arranged as carefully as anything I have seen in a gallery this trip.
But the reason I kept this frame is the glass. The palace across the road is sitting right on top of the books, windows and all, and there is a car parked halfway through a sixteenth century title page. I could have moved two feet and lost the reflection. Why would I.
Then late in the day, the best thing in Turin.
A plaster workshop, and I do mean packed. Torsos, heads, hands, feet, capitals, rosettes, lengths of cornice, stacked and leaning and hung on every wall from the floor to the ceiling with a path about a foot wide going down the middle of it. And right at the back, somebody at a bench, head down, getting on with it.
These are the things art students have drawn from for four hundred years. The same shoulder, the same ear, the same bit of moulding, over and over until your hand knows it. I learned on them. Half the animators I ever worked with learned on them.
And here they all are, not in a museum, not behind rope. In a shop. Being made, this afternoon, by a person with plaster dust on their forearms, because somebody somewhere still needs one.
Monday’s list said Butte aux Cailles, so naturally I went Sunday. A stencilled rat guarding a doorway, and Aydar’s flowering women watching the street from two walls of the thirteenth. All of it in black and white, which is to say, my language.
A postcard collage in a Popincourt gallery, a wall of painted cats, and then the Maison de Victor Hugo, where the man who wrote Les Miserables turns out to have drawn moonlit castles in brown ink better than most of us ever will.
For a few minutes around eight the sun sits inside the Arc de Triomphe and the whole avenue turns to brass. Then home through the metro, where the Picasso museum has hung its rooster over the escalators.
