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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Picós are enormous, hand-painted sound systems from Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Built from stacked speakers and amplifiers, each has its own name, visual identity and devoted following. Their fronts are painted with fluorescent animals, spaceships, warriors and whatever else might adequately announce several thousand watts.
Pen & Pixel was a Houston design studio that gave Southern rap its preferred reality: one in which everything was chrome, flaming, diamond-covered and slightly larger than Earth. Founded by brothers Shawn and Aaron Brauch in 1992, the studio produced thousands of album covers for labels including No Limit and Cash Money.
SLABs are heavily customized cars that emerged from Houston’s Black neighbourhoods in the 1980s. The name is often expanded as “Slow, Loud and Bangin’,” which also serves as instructions. Usually built from large American sedans, they feature candy paint, whitewall tyres, elaborate trunks and wire wheels called swangas, whose spokes extend sideways into traffic.
King’s lomatia is a sterile shrub hidden in the wilderness of south-west Tasmania. With three sets of chromosomes, it cannot produce viable seed. Instead, it survives by cloning itself: old stems fall over, take root and rise again. Fossilised leaves suggest this cycle has continued for at least 43,600 years.
The Dornier Do X was a three-storey flying boat built in 1929, then the largest aircraft in the world. Its twelve engines sat in pairs above the wing and were controlled by an engineer, who received instructions from the pilots through a ship-style engine telegraph. Inside were sleeping berths, a dining room and a lounge. On one demonstration flight it carried 169 people, including nine stowaways, setting a record that lasted twenty years. The Do X later flew from Germany to New York, though fires, repairs and repeated stops stretched the journey to nearly ten months. It crossed the Atlantic successfully, provided nobody was in a hurry.