Saya Hnin-Mahla was a Burmese snake charmer and ritual priestess known for performing with king cobras. In footage shot around 1939 by wildlife documentarian Armand Denis, she faces a large cobra with her hands held behind her back. She moves with the raised animal, avoids its lunges, then bends forward and kisses it on the head three times. Afterwards, she simply turns and walks away.
Since 2013, several intersections in Kinshasa have been governed by eight-foot aluminium robots. Designed by Congolese engineer Thérèse Izay Kirongozi and built by the women-led cooperative Wotech, they rotate at the waist, raise their arms and flash red or green lights from their palms. Solar panels rise from their heads like enormous hats, while cameras in their eyes record motorists. They were introduced partly because traffic lights were unreliable and human officers could be ignored—or bribed. The robots cannot pursue anyone, but drivers reportedly obey them.
The Nana Benz were a group of women who turned Lomé’s fabric market into one of West Africa’s commercial centres. From the 1960s onward, they controlled the distribution of sought-after Dutch wax prints, travelled to Europe to advise manufacturers and gave anonymous factory designs names such as “My Rival’s Eye” and “If You Go Out, I Go Out.” The names turned clothing into public messages—and stock numbers into stories people remembered. Their fortunes bought property, paid for education and brought political influence. They became known as the Nana Benz because many drove Mercedes-Benz cars through Lomé.
In the 1960s, teacher and independence activist Edward Makuka Nkoloso founded Zambia’s unofficial National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. He intended to beat the United States and Soviet Union to the Moon, then send teenager Matha Mwamba, two cats and a missionary to Mars. Outside Lusaka, his “Afronauts” trained with oil drums and rope swings intended to simulate weightlessness. The programme had no government support, its proposed funding never arrived and its homemade rocket remained on Earth. Whether Nkoloso was entirely sincere, satirising the space race and colonial attitudes, or doing both at once remains unresolved.
Villa Kérylos is an ancient Greek house completed on the French Riviera in 1908. Classical scholar Théodore Reinach and architect Emmanuel Pontremoli modelled it on the noble villas of second-century BC Delos, recreating their mosaics, frescoes, courtyards and furniture with archaeological seriousness. Every room received a Greek name, and reproductions of ancient chairs were commissioned from Parisian cabinetmakers.
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 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.
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.
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 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.