We drove up the hill behind the house to visit the impossibly remote Cistercian monastery designed by Aimaro d’Isola in the late 1980s. We’re beginning to recognise the hallmarks of his style: good use of materials; an exaggerated adherence to the vernacular; a mixture of Aldo Rossi and Ted Cullinan.
One looks out of the side of the church to the hillside beyond:
In the afternoon, we went on a pilgrimage to Lingotto, the palace of the automobile in the southern suburbs of Turin, begun in 1916 and opened in 1923. After pizza in a Turkish café, we discovered the great car ramp:
On the roof is the car track:
Built to rival Detroit, it’s not surprising that it was so admired by Le Corbusier and Jim Stirling.
We spent the morning at Stupinigi, one of the grand hunting lodges of the Kings of Savoy designed by Filippo Juvarra in the vicinity of Turin. Since it doesn’t have disabled access, we were condemned to explore the outside:
I woke early to find the rain had cleared, the sun was shining, and the church bells were ringing in all the local villages:
I had a freezing cold swim and went for a brisk walk up to a field where there are boxes of brightly coloured beehives overlooking the mountains:
Today we celebrated the season of our sixtieth birthdays with a banquet in the Castle:
This was the menu card:
We are staying in a converted agricultural building in the grounds of the castle of Bagnolo, south west of Turin.
It was converted by Aimaro Isola, of the firm Gabetti and Isola, who were important to Italian architecture in the 1950s, deeply interested in environmental design, and (at least according to the reference books) friends of Ernesto Rogers. The children are staying in another similar property nearer the castle.
Deadly quiet at lunchtime on Good Friday. A large town square underneath the mountains. Good 1920s war memorial:
Nice church:
We have made a mad dash to Piedmont across the long agricultural lowlands of central France, across the Somme, past the great silhouette of Laon Cathedral seen in the distance from the road, past Rheims, Beaune and Cluny, all places associated with the pilgrimage roads, and then East to the Alps. We’ve followed the route of a journey I first undertook with two schoolfriends in 1971 in an Austin A30, a version of the grand tour. They got annoyed with me because I wanted to go to Autun and Vezelay and they wanted to get drunk.
Have just been to a talk by Christo: not just a talk, but an event, performance and peroration. He spoke a bit about his life – actually not quite enough: born in Bulgaria, escaped from Prague, educated at the Academy of Fine Arts (as an artist or as an architect ?) in Vienna, moving to Paris and then to New York in 1964 where he has lived in the same tenement block ever since, using the small studio at the top of the building, doing all the work on his projects with his wife Jeanne Claude and without a big office of assistants. He showed images of many of his projects – the Valley Curtain in Colorado, the Running Fence in California, the wrapping of the Reichstag and of the Pont Neuf. It’s completely obvious that he likes the process and politics of the gestation at least as much as the finished result. What wasn’t entirely clear is how he uses the process of drawing which he does after the project has been conceived in order to support it financially. There was a quality of enthusiastic innocence about his presentation which has won over audiences internationally, including most recently in Abu Dhabi where he is building up community support for a project in the desert. So, the question nobody asked is why he’s never done anything in Britain: umbrellas in the Lake District ? wrapping the Royal Academy?
Our last appointment in Amsterdam was to go to the Van Loon house where we had arranged to meet Marlene Dumas, who has recently been appointed as an Honorary RA. She said that she hadn’t been sure whether to accept or not, but did so on behalf of women artists everywhere. I attach a photograph of us both raising a glass to this (sorry about my suit).
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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