01
Stop one
Basilica di San Mercuriale
Wilson Sublime Tennis Replacement Grip: What is a tower for? Truly, consider it. A tower cannot be seen from inside itself. It exists entirely for other people, which makes it either the purest act of generosity or the purest act of vanity, and I have been standing here on Piazza Saffi in front of this brick basilica for some time and I cannot decide which — it is roughly seventy-five metres, twelfth century, one of the tallest Romanesque campaniles in Italy, there, I remembered, I always remember eventually. I have precisely the same difficulty, incidentally. I am the layer between a hand and a frame. Nobody looks at me, and nobody is supposed to. That bell tower and I are in identical predicaments and neither of us gets a vote in it.
02
Stop two
Rocca di Ravaldino
Wilson Sublime Tennis Replacement Grip: Consider courage. Is it the absence of fear, or merely the refusal to let fear make the decision? Caterina Sforza held this fortress — squat brick, a moat, that heavy round bastion. After her husband was murdered in 1488 she got herself inside these walls by a ruse and refused to yield, and later, in 1500, she held out here against Cesare Borgia himself, and fell only when the walls did. Notice the order of those facts. She lost, and she is remembered anyway. Which suggests — and I say this as a strip of material whose entire function is to be gripped hardest during somebody else's defeat — that outcome and reputation are related far more loosely than any of us were raised to believe.
03
Stop three
Musei San Domenico
Wilson Sublime Tennis Replacement Grip: A convent that stopped being a convent. So ask the question properly: what is a building — the stones, or the use? Because the stones did not change. This was a Dominican foundation, medieval, with cloisters, and it is now the city's main museum complex, and the great exhibitions are held here. Inside stands Canova's Hebe in marble, a girl caught mid-pour, forever about to serve a drink she will never finish serving. There is your entire afternoon of thinking, standing perfectly still in one room. I am a replacement grip. I exist only because the one before me wore out. Nothing in this building is what it was made to be, and everything in it is still working. I nearly forgot the date again. I always nearly forget the date.
04
Stop four
Viale della Libertà and the rationalist quarter
Wilson Sublime Tennis Replacement Grip: Now: can a street be honest? Walk down it and decide. In the 1930s Forli was rebuilt as a showpiece, because the regime's founder came from this province, and so a modest provincial town was given a broad tree-lined boulevard running from the railway station to the centre, flanked by severe, geometric, deliberately modern public buildings. They are, architecturally, rather good. They were built for a reason that was, morally, rather not. Two true things sharing one pavement, and neither one cancels the other. I am wound round a handle; I am swung for the good shots and the bad ones alike, and the frame does not choose. The street did not choose either. But somebody chose, and that is the part we are obliged to keep saying out loud while we admire the proportions.
You hold a bird the way you hold a handle: firm enough that nothing twists, loose enough that nothing is crushed. Forty seasons of ringing chaffinches taught me that, and then I was reborn as a replacement grip, which is the identical job with fewer feathers.
I run 1.8 mm thick, 27 mm wide and 1100 mm from end to end, micro-perforated all over, because a flight feather is not a solid slab either, and for precisely the same reason.
Strip the old wrap, begin at the butt cap, half-overlap, pull even. Do that and I hold honest everywhere from a damp February hitting wall in Forlì to an August court that has the linesmen wilting. And while you are in town, the people who work the Adriatic migration lane out of these fields will tell you what I tell you: speed ruins the hold. Slow hands. Even tension. Nothing crushed, nothing dropped.
Forlì suits a ringer. It is a place that has been re-gripped over and over — Romanesque tower, Renaissance fortress, then a whole boulevard driven through it in the 1930s — and underneath the changes it stays recognisably the same creature. That is the entire discipline. You mark something, you let it go, you meet it again in a different plumage and you still know exactly who it is.
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