01
Stop one
Palazzo Dogana
Wilson Profile Recreational Adult Tennis Racquet: A grand civic facade on the square, and before anybody starts on Aragonese kings, let us be clear about what actually happened inside this building: tax. It was the headquarters of the Dogana delle pecore, the sheep customs office, established here in the fifteenth century to skim the great seasonal migration of flocks down from the mountains onto the Tavoliere plain. Twice a year. Hundreds of thousands of animals. Hundreds of kilometres of drove road, in every weather that exists. The crown collected. The clerks tallied. The men who did the moving were paid in cheese and grief. Humanity has built precisely one thing more reliably than it builds cathedrals, and you are looking at it. It is a very handsome invoice.
02
Stop two
Foggia Cathedral (Basilica Cattedrale di Santa Maria Icona Vetere)
Wilson Profile Recreational Adult Tennis Racquet: Look at it honestly: this is two buildings having an argument in public. The lower storey is Norman-era Romanesque of the twelfth century, sober, heavy, put up by people with nothing to prove. The upper section and the dome are Baroque, because a catastrophic earthquake in seventeen thirty-one brought much of it down and the rebuild arrived in an entirely different fashion. Which raises the question nobody has ever carved into stone: who cleared the rubble? Who quarried, hauled and set every one of those blocks a second time, having already done the whole job once? There is no plaque for the man who carried the second load. There never is, in any city, in any century. Splendid church. Ask me again in a hundred years and I shall say the same thing.
04
Stop four
Teatro Umberto Giordano
Wilson Profile Recreational Adult Tennis Racquet: The municipal opera theatre, named for Umberto Giordano, a composer born right here in Foggia in eighteen sixty-seven, whose operas went on to be performed across the world – and his father was a tradesman, which is the only detail in this paragraph that genuinely moves me. Now look up at that ceiling and count the people who are not on the poster. The plasterers. The scene painters. The carpenters. The seamstresses running up costumes overnight so that a first night could happen at all. An opera is the most collective object human beings make, and we have agreed, as a species, to print one name on the front of it. One name on the poster. Two hundred on the payroll. Do enjoy the show.
I count. That is the job, and in Foggia it was once the entire economy. The Dogana delle pecore, the sheep customs office, sat in the Palazzo Dogana from the fifteenth century and taxed the seasonal migration of flocks onto the Tavoliere plain. Hundreds of thousands of animals, twice a year, and somebody at the gate with a tally stick. That somebody was me.
So I have a view on a racquet for ordinary people, and in Foggia the view is unsentimental. This is a recreational adult frame: grip size 2, which is 4 1/4 inches round, light in the hand, forgiving, priced like something a family buys rather than something a magazine reviews. I counted the flock, never the shepherd's poetry. No shame attaches to equipment that simply works on a Sunday.
Foggia is honest about this if you let it. One arch survives of the palace Frederick II built here in the 1220s, and the emperor is remembered by the fragment while the masons who dressed his stone are remembered by nothing. The cathedral is Romanesque below and Baroque above because an earthquake in 1731 brought half of it down and somebody carried every block twice.
This racquet is for the people who carry the second load. It goes everywhere from a municipal court with a sagging net to a holiday hard court, and it is also perfect for the friend you are coaxing into the game before they spend real money.
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