Charlie
Coccoi pintau, meaning “decorated bread,” is Sardinian ceremonial bread sculpted into lace-like crowns, flowers, pomegranates, birds, fish and turtles. The firm semolina dough is cut with knives, scissors, wheels and tweezers before baking, with different forms made for weddings, Easter and religious festivals. Breadmaking was traditionally a communal ritual beginning at dawn; decoration was entrusted to the women with the steadiest hands.
In 1831, Prussian architect Carl Ferdinand Langhans built the Pleorama, an indoor simulation of a voyage around the Bay of Naples. Twenty-four passengers sat inside a wooden boat floating in a pool while enormous painted coastlines moved past on either side. The boat rocked, a boatman sang, the light changed and Mount Vesuvius appeared to erupt. The journey lasted an hour and went nowhere.
Concha García Zaera was a Spanish digital artist who began using Microsoft Paint in her mid-seventies, after the smell of oil paint disturbed her ill husband. Working point by point with a mouse, she spent weeks constructing detailed landscapes inspired by photographs and postcards her husband had sent from his travels. Her granddaughter opened an Instagram account for her, and at 87 she became an unlikely star of pixel art. Disney later commissioned her to recreate the poster for Mary Poppins Returns entirely in Paint.
Catatumbo Lightning is a recurring concentration of thunderstorms above Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo, the most lightning-dense place on Earth. Warm, humid air rising from the lake meets cooler winds descending from the surrounding mountains, repeatedly rebuilding storms over the same location after dark. Lightning can continue for hours, illuminating the horizon so consistently that sailors once used it as a natural lighthouse known as the Beacon of Maracaibo.
Casa do Penedo is a house built between four enormous boulders in the mountains of northern Portugal. Completed in 1974 as a family retreat, the rocks serve as its foundation, walls and parts of its ceiling, with smaller stones filling the gaps between them. Despite standing beside a wind farm, the house has no electricity. Its attempt to disappear into the landscape instead made it one of Portugal’s most recognizable homes.
The Choux de Créteil are ten cylindrical apartment towers completed in 1974 in Créteil, a suburb southeast of Paris. Each is covered in two-metre-high concrete balconies shaped like petals, giving the complex the appearance of a field of enormous cabbages. The balconies were intended to provide privacy and support cascading plants that would change colour with the seasons. Developers cancelled the planting, leaving the residents to live inside bare concrete vegetables.
The Carrington Event was an immense solar storm that struck Earth in 1859. Auroras appeared across much of the world, reaching as far south as the Caribbean and illuminating the night brightly enough for people to read newspapers outside. Telegraph networks malfunctioned, machines sparked and several stations caught fire. In Boston and Portland, operators disconnected their batteries to protect the equipment and discovered they could still exchange messages, powered entirely by electrical currents induced in the wires by the storm.
Casa Sperimentale is a concrete treehouse hidden in the pinewoods of Fregene, a coastal town near Rome. Built as a family holiday home, it became a seven-year experiment of suspended rooms, external staircases, red pipes and spherical concrete chambers. Its modular parts were designed to be rearranged as the family changed. The house is now abandoned, overgrown and somehow still unfinished.
The club-winged manakin is a small bird from the cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador. To attract females, the male produces a clear, ringing note—not with his voice, but by playing his wings. One feather is ridged like a comb, while another acts as a pick, scraping across it as the wings shake more than 100 times per second. Even his wing bones have become unusually solid to withstand the performance. The bird is less a singer than a musical instrument that flies.
The Codex Rotundus is a late-15th-century Book of Hours whose parchment pages and cover were cut into circles just 9.3 centimetres across. Its 266 pages contain prayers in Latin and French, three full-page miniatures and thirty illustrated initials.