01
Stop one
Confluence of the Stura di Demonte and the Gesso
Wilson Blade Feel 103 Tennis Racquet: Right — your usual guide is off today, so it is me, and I will do my best with it. This is the wedge of high ground at the southern tip of the town, where the Stura di Demonte and the Gesso meet in deep gorges below us. Cuneo. Wedge. That is the whole name, and he says that line far better than I just did. Two alpine rivers, either side, forever, and a town balanced on the point between them. And I should say plainly, because he would: in November 1994 storms across Piedmont flooded this region catastrophically and people died. He would have found the right words for that part. I have only got the plain ones, so I am using those.
04
Stop four
Piazza Galimberti
Wilson Blade Feel 103 Tennis Racquet: Last stop, and then he is back on Thursday and you are all in much better hands. This square was laid out in the 1800s when the old walls came down, ringed with nineteenth-century facades and more arcades, and it is enormous — deliberately so, in a town this cold, which is a kind of statement. In winter the wind funnels straight across it and you feel it. And every single week, regardless of what the sky is doing, the market sets up here: trestles, stalls, the lot, as it has for two centuries. That is really the whole point of the square and I have taken far too long getting to it. He would have said it in one line. Thank you for putting up with me — I enjoyed it, which I probably should not admit.
Four months alone in a tower and you learn the difference between looking and seeing. Anyone can look at a ridge. Seeing means noticing the one thing that has changed since yesterday, and that requires being comfortable enough to stay at the window for eight hours.
The Wilson Blade Feel 103 is built for comfort at the window. A 103 square inch head, 280 g / 9.9 oz unstrung, 27 inches, and a 16×19 string pattern — read that as a Blade you can hold up all afternoon. The larger head gives a wide, generous sweet spot, the light weight means the frame is easy to get round on time, and it arrives pre-strung and ready to play.
This is the recreational end of the Blade family: it takes the line's name and its comfort character but aims squarely at beginners and improving club players rather than at someone who already makes their own pace. Want the Blade feel without the 300-gram commitment, this is the honest answer. Hitting heavy at 4.0, buy the 100.
Cuneo is a town that has spent its whole existence watching water. It sits on the wedge of high ground at the confluence of the Stura di Demonte and the Gesso — cuneo means wedge, that is literally the name — with two alpine rivers running in deep gorges below it, and in November 1994 the storms across Piedmont turned those rivers into something nobody recognised.
From up here you can see both channels at once. That is my entire job description, rendered as a town plan.
Everything built since has been the same instinct, made permanent. The Viadotto Soleri strides nearly a kilometre of brick arches over the Stura gorge on the northern approach, finished in the 1930s, every pier standing that high because somebody looked at the river in flood and said higher.
Along Via Roma the citizens roofed the pavements instead of retreating indoors, eight kilometres of continuous stone portico, and they still set out market trestles on Piazza Galimberti in weather that ends conversations.
A racquet this light goes everywhere from a frozen January hour under the arcades to a hot August evening above the confluence, and it is also perfect for the Cuneo beginner who wants to keep playing right through a season that arrives sideways.
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