Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
A tennis towel, embroidered. Catalogued under: objects that outlast the matches they were carried to. Reggio Emilia keeps a small round room where a flag was adopted in 1797, and the minutes still exist.
Embroidered Tennis Towel: Filed under ‘Excellent Provenance, Slightly Damp Edges’: this is the Sala del Tricolore, where representatives of the Cispadane Republic adopted the green-white-red flag on 7 January 1797. I would note the towel in the margin, but only in pencil; flags dislike competition.
Embroidered Tennis Towel: Shelf mark GHIARA-17C, with the towel behaving as though it too had been frescoed by Reggio’s painters. The Basilica della Ghiara is known for its rich seventeenth-century fresco decoration, including work under the dome by artists tied to the city.
Embroidered Tennis Towel: Box inventory: red, gold, applause, and one textile behaving suspiciously like a prima donna. The Teatro Municipale Valli opened in 1857 and is celebrated for its ornate horseshoe auditorium lined with tiers of boxes.
Embroidered Tennis Towel: Entered in the bridge catalogue under ‘White Steel, Dramatic Arcs, Not a Bookmark.’ Santiago Calatrava designed the three bridges north of Reggio Emilia, whose bright structures span the motorway and rail approaches.
Let us begin with provenance, because everything begins with provenance. A tennis towel is not sports equipment. It is the item most likely to survive a player's whole career, to be carried to every court they ever play on, and to end up in a drawer long after the racquets have been given away. Almost nothing else in a kit bag has that record. I have opinions about which shelf it belongs on.
It is a towel for court use, with embroidery worked into it rather than a print laid on top — and that distinction is the entire archival argument. A printed graphic sits on the surface of the cloth and is degraded by exactly the thing a towel exists for: heat, water, detergent, friction, repeated.
The object itself is straightforward and I will not overstate it.
Embroidery is stitched thread; it is part of the structure. A towel is also the one piece of kit that actually improves with laundering for the first several cycles, as the loops open up and the absorbency rises.
It fades slowly and it does not crack.
Wash it warm, no softener — softener coats the fibre and is the single commonest reason a good towel stops drinking, and I catalogue that under errors repeated indefinitely by people who ought to know.
And Reggio Emilia, which is a city that keeps its records properly. The Sala del Tricolore is a small round room, and in January 1797 the Italian flag was adopted in it, and the room is still there, still small, still round — a fact and its container, held together, which is all any archive is.
The Basilica della Ghiara was frescoed under its dome by the city's own painters rather than imported ones, and the attributions are documented. The Teatro Municipale Valli has its tiers of boxes in red and gold and a seating ledger going back generations.
You will get use out of this towel everywhere from a July clinic to an indoor court back home, and by the way, north of town Calatrava threw three white steel arcs over the motorway, and they will be somebody's provenance problem in three hundred years.
"It is the item most likely to survive the whole career."
