Out early again, because apparently that is who I am now. The Roman quarter at nine in the morning is all shutters and shadow, and I stood at the top of a lane watching the light cut across it. One scooter on the kerb. Wires slung over the middle. Everything else empty. I shoot a lot of this trip in black and white on purpose, and this one came out of the camera already looking like a page I want to ink.
Then I found the gardens behind the Royal Palace and lost half my working morning in them, no guilt at all. Big trees, gravel, cool air, squirrels everywhere. Not the red ones you expect in Europe. These are American greys, and there is a sad story in that. Two pairs came over from Washington in 1948 and were let go at Stupinigi just outside Turin, and their descendants have been quietly pushing the native reds off the plain ever since. Beautiful little vandals. I sat down on the gravel like a kid and filmed one coming down a trunk.
This is the good stuff for me. Not the palace, the animal. A squirrel coming down a tree head first is one long curve with a question mark on the end, and the shape reads before you have worked out what the bits are. How few lines, how much movement. A dozen frames and one of them holds it.
Further in, a marble figure sits in the bushes with a board across the lap, going for calm and classical, and completely ruined by the pigeon standing on its head. Ten minutes, that bird did not move. A city spends centuries getting the dignity exactly right and a pigeon settles it in a second.
Out past the hedge the garden opens onto the palace itself, white and cream and enormous, with a tumble of stone sea creatures in a basin in front of it. That is the Fountain of the Nereid and the Tritons, carved by Simone Martinez around 1757, shut away for years and back on show since the gardens reopened restored in 2021. Nymph in the middle, tritons piling around her, twelve little half fish half human things round the rim. Somebody enjoyed that commission.
After lunch I went to work, down the long straight run to Piazza San Carlo, the square they call Turin’s drawing room. Window after window of prints, and a genre I keep meeting in Europe. Animals in sunglasses. A gorilla, a giraffe, a lion, MORE MONEY sprayed over the top in gold. Easy to be sniffy, and I am trying not to be, because these sell and the reason is worth understanding. Big flat colour, one readable face, a joke you get from across the street. My ink asks more of a person than that.
The rest of the gallery list did not happen, and here is why. Sign after sign behind the grilles, chiuso per ferie, closed 20 July to 18 August, buone vacanze a tutti. All of Italy shuts in August and I have walked straight into the front of it. The contemporary spaces I had written down for this stop stay written down. Some days the doors are open, some days you photograph the door.
One window did have something to say. A stack of Shepard Fairey prints leaning in a row, red and cream, that face of his ringed with roses, MAKE ART NOT WAR across every one. He made it in the Iraq war years, a straight swap on the old make love not war line. Six deep in a Turin window, with the news no better now, it landed harder than I expected.
And then the day turned. Gallerie d’Italia sits on the square in Palazzo Turinetti, and they have Nick Brandt on, The Day May Break, curated by Arianna Rinaldo, running until 6 September. Around sixty photographs in four chapters, made in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Fiji and Jordan. People and animals who have all lost something to the climate falling apart around them, every frame shot through fog so thick that everyone in it is half gone already. A woman and a monkey sitting together in the grey. A rhino with a line of people behind it like witnesses. I walked those dark rooms slowly and came out quiet.
I am not putting his pictures in my journal, they are his and they deserve the wall. But I took the lesson home with me. Tone doing the work of line. Everything unnecessary taken out by the weather. Two figures, no background, all the feeling still there. Same problem I am chasing in black ink, solved by a man with a camera and a lot more patience. Sketchbook out tonight. More soon.
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.
Six days of Venice water and then the train sets you down in Turin, where the whole world suddenly goes straight. A first evening in the old Savoy capital, one bronze count, a dark dome, and a very good dog.
My last Venice morning, and the famous rooftop everyone climbs for the view has been shut for a year. No matter. I had the Rialto at dawn, an empty St Mark’s, and then the rain turned every lane into a mirror.
