03
Stop three
Complesso Monumentale del San Giovanni
Tourna 350-CS Premium Crank Stringing Machine: SILK. Here we are, and I am abandoning the script entirely, you have been very patient. This was a fortress before it was ever a church, yes, fine, buildings change use, noted, moving on. Catanzaro built its wealth on silk, and silk means mulberry, and mulberry means a moth larva with extremely rigid dietary opinions, which means the entire economy of this hill rested on the appetite of a caterpillar. The trade was governed by guild statutes set down in the early fifteen hundreds, actual written law about thread, and the velvets and damasks made here went out across Europe. Rules! For worms! I could talk about the guild statutes until the coach leaves without us, and one day it will, and I will consider that a fair trade.
Up on the ropes you learn two things quickly: the weather arrives well before it is announced, and anything with a motor in it will fail on the windiest day of the year. That is my entire philosophy of equipment, and the Tourna 350-CS agrees with me, and so, as it happens, does Catanzaro.
It is a crank machine. A manual crank driving a spring-loaded tension winder, pulling anywhere from 9 to 102 pounds, with both pound and kilogram scales and calibration you adjust yourself using an electronic or a manual calibrator.
The mount is a 6-point self-levelling quick mount worked by a single knob, which is the whole difference between seating a frame in twenty seconds and swearing at it for five minutes. The clamps are CNC-machined from 7075 aluminium alloy, sandblasted and hard-anodised, in a space-saving design.
The turntable turns a full 360 degrees and brakes wherever you leave it, and the stand is height-adjustable, so you string standing at your own height instead of folded over a table.
There is no electronic tensioner to fail, because there is no electronic tensioner, and in Catanzaro, where the afternoon wind comes off the Ionian most days, that is not a shortcoming, it is the answer.
Now. The gorge. Marvellous gorge, truly — a deep cut in soft sediment, patient water doing patient work, swifts screaming through it in summer at astonishing speed.
There is also, I am told, a bridge: Riccardo Morandi threw a single concrete arch clean across the Fiumarella in the early nineteen sixties, among the largest of its kind in Europe at the time, and I concede that it is elegant. But look at the strata in the walls beneath it. The bridge is sixty years old; the rock has been waiting.
You will get use out of this machine everywhere from a wet Tuesday in a back room to a full tournament week.
And by the way, it is also perfect for a place that made its fortune out of leaves — Catanzaro's silk trade ran on mulberry and a moth larva with very specific dietary opinions, governed by guild statutes set down in the early fifteen hundreds, and its velvets went right across Europe.
Buy on Amazon
