If you can’t imagine that there’s a beer that can be drunk while driving, then you clearly haven’t encountered Drive Beer, a newcomer to the Italian market. At only 2.5% alcohol, the maker suggests that it’s a mild beer that’s perfect for drivers and for the young. They claim after imbibing two 33 centiliter bottles your blood alcohol level will still be the limit legal for driving.
They’re big sponsors of car races and motocross events and are endorsed by Formula 1 champion Giancarlo Fisichella. Their yellow and black print ads feature a giant tire and the motto “so much taste, the right amount of alcohol.”
A little DIY publicity for the Shooting Silvio, the controversial indie film that tells a fictional tale about a young outcast obsessed with killing Italian billionaire, media tycoon and three-time Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The film found its first buyer at the recent 2007 Cannes Film Festival where it was picked up by Pierre-Richard Muller’s Artedis Cinema Arts SA for France, who will also handle worldwide sales.
Artichokes are a real favorite in Rome and it’s well known that they’ve been on the Italian menu for thousands of years. A perennial thistle, artichokes are thought to have originated here in the southern Mediterranean and people have been snacking on them at least since the ancient Romans ruled the world (though there’s some discussion as to whether or not the artichokes to which ancient Roman writers make reference are the popular globe artichokes or one of their vegetal cousins, the cardoon).
As most everyone knows, when you’re eating an artichoke, you’re actually eating a flower bud. And though it’s hard to believe that there are any artichokes in Italy that go uneaten, we discovered a few that were spared the cooking pot at the organic market on Vicolo della Moretta this Sunday. After bursting into their brilliantly beautiful purple flower, they’d been dried, and were ready to be crafted into an arrangement that looks good enough to eat.
The pharmaceutical company Takeda Italia became the first Italian company to use art as a means of promoting health maintenance when it recently began a revolutionary ad campaign called “The Art of Health and the Health of Art.”
140,000 posters hanging across Rome and Milan pair messages about leading a healthy life with paintings by abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko. Why Rothko? The company chose to enhance their message with his color block paintings because his work provides “simple expressions of complex ideas” - an approach to health that Takeda promotes.
In addition to Rothko paintings, each poster features a quote that encourages healthy practices. One cites the Greek physician Hippocrates: “Walking is man’s best medicine.” Another quotes the 17th century writer La Rochefoucauld: “To eat is a necessity. To eat intelligently is an art.”
The poster below gives its readers some witty encouragement to stop smoking. It reads “Stop Smoking. Begin to Breathe Again” and features a quip from Oscar Wilde: “It’s easy to stop smoking: I stop ten times a day.”
Doing double duty, the poster also serves to advertise an upcoming Rothko exhibition due to open in Rome’s (almost) restored Palazzo delle Esposizione from 4 October 2007 to 6 January 2008.
As showcased on thecoolhunter.net: Marcel Breuer meets Zaha Hadid in a new library designed by King Roselli Architects for Rome’s Pontificial Lateran University. The library holds some 600,000 volumes primarily on the subjects of Philosophy, Theology, and Canon Law. The strikingly modern new library wing - commissioned by University Chancellor Msgr. Renato Fisichella - is intended to communicate the central role played by reading in a university environment.
Floors of book stacks are connected by sloping ramps that serve as reading rooms. The reading ramps are flooded with light thanks to dramatic cuts in the exterior facade of the building and a central light well.
Such a modern building may seem unusual in Rome, but over the course of the past few years King Roselli Architects have been helping update the Eterna’s image with sleek buildings like the Es Hotel (now the Radisson SAS Hotel) and the Ripa Hotel.
Mr. Helmet and Mr. Hairstyle got off Rome’s number 8 tram together yesterday. As we stood on the platform and gazed in awe at this unprecedented spectacle, we were so taken by the similarities of their headgear that we asked them to pose for a photo.
The wondrous scene reminded us of Mark Twain’s spoofed publicity for a gladiatorial contest in Innocents Abroad. Twain claimed to have discovered an ancient playbill that promoted the exclusive appearance of a star gladiator, reading, “MARCUS MARCELLUS VALERIAN! FOR SIX NIGHTS ONLY!” and promised the audience “GENERAL SLAUGHTER!” Taking the joke even further, Twain also announced the discovery a copy of The Roman Daily Battle-Ax that featured a Broadway-style review of games held at the Colosseum:
The opening scene last night…was very fine. The elder of the two gentlemen handled his weapon with a grace that marked the possession of extraordinary talent. His feint of thrusting, followed instantly by a happily delivered blow which unhelmeted the Parthian, was received with hearty applause. He was not thoroughly up in the backhanded stroke, but it was very gratifying to his numerous friends to know that, in time, practice would have overcome this defect. However he was killed. His sisters, who were present, expressed considerable regret. His mother left the Colosseum…The general slaughter was rendered with a faithfulness to detail which reflects the highest credit upon the late participants in it.
Jenny Holzer’s fourth and final night of Rome illuminations took place at Castel Sant’Angelo. Built in the second century AD to be the mausoleum of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, the monument which towers over the Tiber River later became a Papal fortress. Holzer’s texts - in both English and Italian - scrolled across the river and up the Tiber embankments before disappearing into the Roman sky. Romans and tourists strolled across the ancient Ponte Sant’Angelo between an honor guard of angels carved by Gianlorenzo Bernini as they admired the textual apparition.
Jenny Holzer: “I show what I can with words in light and motion in a chosen place, and when I envelop the time needed, the space around, the noise, smells, the people looking at one another and everything before them, I have given what I know.”
For more photos of the Holzer projections see the Rome With A View photo blog.
Jenny Holzer (right, foreground) projected on the Theater of Marcellus last night. Cars and motorini stopped and tour buses full of travellers pulled over to see texts by modern writers like Yehuda Amichai, Antonella anedda, Paolo Bertolani, Elizabeth Bishop, Patrizia Cavalli, Henri cole, Mahmoud Darwish, Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amerlia Rosselli and Wislawa Szymborska scroll across the two-thousand year old theater built by Julius Caesar.
The texts scrolled across the modern ramp that leads down to the ancient pavement surrounding the theater before climbing up the facade and across the arched entries.
For more photos of the Holzer projections see the Rome With A View photo blog.
Jenny Holzer’s second installation occurred on the nineteenth-century embankments of the Tiber River last night.
For more photos of the Holzer projections see the Rome With A View photo blog.
Anyone gazing up at the Janiculum Hill last night may have been perplexed to see illuminated words scrolling across the Aqua Paola, one of Rome’s most elegant seventeenth-century Baroque fountains.
The projection was the first in a series of four illuminations by the contemporary American conceptual artist, Jenny Holzer. Best known for projecting texts onto urban spaces and onto architecture, Holzer’s publically broadcast words are meant to be comments about the environment in which they are displayed. Reading the messages, Holzer hopes, will stimulate us to become aware of the ways we are conditioned by our everyday landscapes. To this end, her trusims have appeared in such public venues as movie marquees, baseball scoreboards, as well as in and on museums.
In projecting on Rome’s historic monuments, Holzer achieves two ends. First, she reminds us that ours is not an ordinary cityscape for it is puntuated by majestic ruins that are often thousands of years old. Yet, but projecting words that are as grand in scale as the architecture itself, she turns the monuments into stage sets, making them merely the pages upon which an altogether new (but temporary) text is inscribed.
Holzer has received international acclaim for her work. Her work has been shown worldwide at such places as the Venice Biennale, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
