Opus – Page 10 – Encyclopædia of the sublime

Vittoriale degli Italiani

The Vittoriale degli Italiani is Gabriele D’Annunzio’s nine-hectare monument to Gabriele D’Annunzio. Created above Lake Garda from 1921, it contains his darkened house, 33,000 books and thousands of objects arranged according to a private system of symbols and mottos. The entrance has separate waiting rooms for welcome and unwelcome guests; the dining room displays a tortoise that supposedly died from overeating. Outside are D’Annunzio’s aeroplane, a torpedo boat and the prow of the warship Puglia, transported in pieces on twenty railway carriages and rebuilt in the hillside.

Villa Santo Sospir

Villa Santo Sospir is a house on Cap Ferrat transformed by a guest who did not know when to stop. In 1950, its owner Francine Weisweiller invited Jean Cocteau to stay for a week. One afternoon, he drew an enormous head of Apollo above the fireplace. Weisweiller approved, so Cocteau continued across the walls, doors and ceilings, filling the villa with mythological figures drawn in charcoal and pigments mixed with raw milk. He rejected the word frescoes, calling them tattoos applied directly to the house’s skin. Cocteau returned for more than a decade. The guest eventually left; the drawings did not.

Michelotti Shellette

The Michelotti Shellette was a tiny beach car commissioned by yacht designer Philip Schell and introduced in 1968. Giovanni Michelotti removed the doors from a Fiat 850, cut its sides low and furnished the interior with wicker seats, wood trim and an entirely wicker-covered dashboard. A canvas canopy provided approximately as much protection as Mediterranean owners expected to need. Roughly eighty were made, often as land tenders carried aboard yachts. Aristotle Onassis ordered an automatic version whose removable wicker glovebox could also serve as a breadbasket. The Shellette was designed for the narrow distance between a marina and lunch.

Fiat 500 Jolly

The Fiat 500 Jolly was a beach car created by Italian coachbuilder Ghia in the late 1950s. A standard Fiat arrived at the workshop and left without its doors, roof, side windows or conventional seats. In their place were wicker chairs and a striped fabric canopy, often finished with decorative fringe. Built for resorts, golf courses and wealthy yacht owners, the Jolly was small enough to be lifted aboard and unloaded at the next Mediterranean port.

E.1027

E.1027 is a small modernist house built by Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici on the French Riviera between 1926 and 1929. Its coded name combines their initials: E for Eileen, 10 for J, 2 for B and 7 for G. Gray designed everything from the windows to the movable furniture, treating the house as a machine adjusted to its occupants. Years later, Le Corbusier stayed there and painted eight large murals across its white walls—with Badovici’s permission, but without Gray’s. She considered them vandalism. Le Corbusier subsequently tried to buy the house and, failing that, built himself a cabin next door.

Isola Bella

Isola Bella was a barren rock in Lake Maggiore until the Borromeo family began converting it into a private baroque world in the seventeenth century. A palace occupies one end; behind it, ten garden terraces rise 37 metres above the water, giving the island the shape of an enormous stone ship. Its decks are crowded with grottoes, fountains, obelisks and statues, culminating in a giant unicorn—the Borromeo family emblem.

Villa Lysis

Villa Lysis is a neoclassical fantasy built on a cliff above Capri by the French poet and aristocrat Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen. Forced to leave Paris after a scandal involving minors, Fersen settled on the island and completed his private retreat in 1905. Its severe columns and white façade conceal blue-tiled rooms, golden mosaics, terraces facing the Gulf of Naples and a basement chamber arranged around a marble altar. The villa was named after Plato’s dialogue on friendship. Above the entrance, Fersen added its less restrained dedication: Amori et Dolori Sacrum—sacred to love and sorrow.

Urantia Book

The Urantia Book is a 2,097-page religious text published anonymously in Chicago in 1955. It calls Earth “Urantia” and explains God, human history and the life of Jesus through 196 papers attributed to an extensive hierarchy of celestial beings. Its origins centre on psychiatrist William Sadler and an unidentified man who reportedly delivered communications while asleep; no human author was ever named. The book combines Christian theology with cosmology, philosophy and elaborate descriptions of inhabited worlds, superuniverses and their management. It is less a scripture than an administrative manual for infinity.

Kuwait Water Towers

The Kuwait Water Towers are thirty-one enormous concrete mushrooms distributed across Kuwait City in five groups. Commissioned in 1965 as part of a modern water system, each tower stores 3,000 cubic metres of desalinated water. Swedish architect Sune Lindström varied their heights, numbers and geometric stripes so that every cluster became a neighbourhood landmark. A sixth location demanded something more spectacular and produced the better-known Kuwait Towers: three needles decorated with blue-green spheres. Together, the structures hold more than 100 million litres.

Riva Aquarama Lamborghini

In 1968, Ferruccio Lamborghini ordered a mahogany Riva Aquarama and decided its standard V8 engines were inadequate. He replaced them with two 4-litre Lamborghini V12s, giving the turquoise-upholstered boat 700 horsepower and a top speed of 48 knots. It was the fastest Aquarama ever built. After Lamborghini sold it in 1988, the expensive V12s were removed and the boat eventually disappeared beneath a tarpaulin in a boatyard. Rediscovered in 2010, it was restored using replacement engines recreated with help from the Lamborghini Museum. Hull number 278 remains the only Aquarama built this way.