Four stops before the checkout

Ollantaytambo, Peru

beginner tennis classes Flagler Village — the Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet resting on a worn stone step close in the foreground on the Temple Hill at Ollantaytambo, Peru, the six huge upright rose rhyolite blocks of the Wall of the Six Monoliths rising behind it, camera near ground level looking up, early climbers already on the terrace stair in raking morning light

Stop one

The Temple Hill and the Wall of the Six Monoliths

Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet: Provenance first, always. Six monoliths, pink rhyolite, each on the order of fifty tonnes, quarried at Kachiqhata about six kilometres away on the far side of the Urubamba valley — which meant lowering them from the quarry, taking them across the river and hauling them up the mountainside. The blocks abandoned along that entire route are, to my mind, the finest finding aid imaginable: the transport record survives in situ, uncatalogued and unloseable. The wall and its ceremonial complex were still unfinished when the Spanish conquest interrupted the work. The structure is understood as a temple associated with the sun; the terraces below are agricultural and retaining works of the same imperial campaign.

beginner tennis classes Flagler Village — the Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet standing on a stone wall off to the right in the town of Ollantaytambo, Peru, the pale rectangular Pinkuylluna storehouses seen straight on at eye level high on the cliff face across the roofs, women setting out produce in the plaza below under hard bright midday sun

Stop two

The Inca town of Qosqo Ayllu

Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet: The residential quarter of the Inca town, laid out in the fifteenth century as rectangular walled compounds called canchas, each entered through a single doorway. And here is what quietly thrills me: it is the best-preserved Inca urban plan still in everyday use anywhere. The street grid, the compound walls, the doorways and the running water channels are original fabric, and the compounds are still occupied by families. A living document, permanently in circulation, never accessioned, never shelved. Ollantaytambo was an estate of the emperor Pachacuti, who is credited with the town's foundation and its layout. Attribution: firm. I do like a firm attribution.

beginner tennis classes Flagler Village — a wide elevated view looking down the cut-stone agricultural terraces and the long sunken Callejón corridor at Ollantaytambo, Peru toward the Urubamba river, the Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet small in the frame on a stone parapet at the near edge, farmers working a terrace and llamas grazing below in golden-hour light

Stop three

Pinkuylluna storehouses

Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet: Qollqas — Inca storehouses — built high on the mountainside because the cold and the constant wind at that height kept harvested grain and other produce dry and slowed spoilage, with ventilation openings on opposite walls made to draw air straight through. That is climate control, engineered, and I say so as someone who has argued about the humidity in a records room and lost. Their position above the town also allowed stores to be moved down by gravity. Pinkuylluna itself was regarded as an apu, a sacred mountain, and a natural rock formation on its face is traditionally read as a human profile. Traditionally read — I am careful with that phrase.

beginner tennis classes Flagler Village — a close, shallow-focus photograph of the Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet lying on wet carved stone beside the Baño de la Ñusta at Manyaraki in Ollantaytambo, Peru, the stepped fountain spout throwing its flat sheet of water off-centre behind it, women filling containers at dusk in fine drifting rain under lamplight

Stop four

Baño de la Ñusta (the Princess Bath)

Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet: A piece of Inca ceremonial stonework of the imperial period, fed from the water system that supplies the whole site, and cut so that the water leaves the spout in a single unbroken square-sectioned jet. Square. In water. Somebody solved that and left no note. It stands in the sector at the foot of the temple terraces where the Inca channels were brought to the surface. And the entry that belongs in the same file: Ollantaytambo was the setting for a defeat of the Spanish in January 1537, when Manco Inca, holding the terraces, flooded the plain below to break the charge of Hernando Pizarro's cavalry and forced a withdrawal to Cusco. Water again. Same system.

The Ollantaytambo, Peru track

Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Ollantaytambo is a town in the Sacred Valley at 2,792 metres, and it is the only Inca settlement still lived in on its original plan — an orthogonal grid of four long streets crossed by seven, with families in walled compounds that were laid out before anyone in Europe had heard of Peru.

Which raises a question worth sitting with for a moment: what is the right size for a thing a person will grow into?The Super 19 is Diadem's answer for the very beginning. It is 19 inches long with an 84 square inch head, weighs about 185 g (6.5 oz), comes pre-strung with synthetic gut, and is built for children roughly four to six years old. Grip size is G0, four inches.

It ships with a cover. That is the whole specification, and there is not more to say, because there is not more there — a first racquet's job is to be light enough that a small arm can swing it through the ball without learning a bad habit to compensate, and short enough that the child can actually get to the ball.And that is the interesting part.

Everything else on this site is designed to make you better. This one is designed to make itself unnecessary.

In about eighteen months your child will outgrow it, and that will be the whole point — the same logic as the terraces above the town, which are not a monument to anything but a machine for growing food, built by people who assumed somebody else would be eating from them.

You'll use it everywhere from the courtyard at home to a court on holiday, and by the way, it is also perfect for the flat ground below the terraces, where a four-year-old can miss for an hour beneath two hundred steps of fitted stone and not feel small.

Afterwards, if you are anywhere near the Sacred Valley, the chicha morada is purple, cold and made from corn, and no child has ever turned it down.Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis RacquetCome join the Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet for a tour of Ollantaytambo, Peru.
• **The Temple Hill and the Wall of the Six Monoliths** — Six vast rose rhyolite blocks fitted together on an unfinished temple, left mid-sentence when history interrupted.

• **The Pinkuylluna Storehouses** — Stone granaries set high on the cliff face so the cold wind would keep the grain, with windows on both sides to move air through. • **The Terraces and the Callejón** — Seven hundred metres of sunken terracing engineered to run two to three degrees warmer than the valley around it.

• **The Baño de la Ñusta** — A carved stone fountain at Manyaraki still running the water the Inca sent to it, five centuries later, without a pump.

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Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet

Diadem Super 19 Junior Tennis Racquet

Four stops before the checkout