01
Stop one
Cittadella di Alessandria
Babolat Evo Aero Tennis Racquet: Consider a fortress that was never attacked. Is that a failure, or is it the most complete success a building can have — a thing so obviously unwise to approach that nobody ever approached it? Six bastions in a six-pointed star on the Bormida bank across from the centre, with ravelins, tunnels, and an entire hidden town underneath for the soldiers who spent their lives waiting for something that did not come. And the rarest part: the ground around it was never built on, so the glacis is still open, which makes this one of the very few star forts in Europe surviving complete with its surrounding ground. Later it held prisoners, which is what we do with rooms we no longer need. The Savoy raised it in the eighteenth century. There — I very nearly walked us out of here without a date.
02
Stop two
Museo Borsalino
Babolat Evo Aero Tennis Racquet: What is a hat? Not the felt — the felt I can describe: rabbit fur, worked wet, shaped over wooden blocks, finished by hand across a great many stages, and the machinery for all of it is in this museum. I mean the other thing. The moment when a maker's name stops being a name and becomes the word for the object itself. For decades, a Borsalino was simply what a hat was called. The firm dressed half of Europe and a good deal of Hollywood, and then the world stopped wearing hats, and the word stayed behind like a house after the family has gone. Does an object outlive its purpose, or does it merely wait? Since 1857, incidentally, here in this town. The making. I should have opened with that.
03
Stop three
Marengo battlefield and museum
Babolat Evo Aero Tennis Racquet: Here is a flat plain east of the city at Spinetta Marengo, and here is the question it asks. Napoleon very nearly lost this battle, was rescued by the late arrival of a subordinate's division, and then arranged the reporting of it so that it read as a masterstroke. So which of those two things happened? The battle, or the account of the battle? Only one of them still exists in any form you can visit. There is a chicken dish named after that day, and the horse he later rode was called Marengo as well, so the plain survives as a recipe, an animal, and a paragraph the loser of the morning wrote himself. The museum here is small; truth does not require much floor space. June 1800. Yes — I did remember.
04
Stop four
Palatium Vetus
Babolat Evo Aero Tennis Racquet: A city is founded and immediately it needs a name, so the Lombard League called this one Alessandria after Pope Alexander the Third, purely to flatter him, which is what new towns do when they have nothing else to offer yet. Frederick Barbarossa besieged it and failed, and out of spite the imperial party started calling it Alessandria of the straw, on account of the roofs. An insult about thatch that has outlived the emperor who enjoyed making it. So is a place its own stones, or is it what its enemies decided to call it? This brick civic palace on Piazza della Libertà is from exactly that period, sober, recently restored, now a foundation's headquarters. Eleven sixty-eight, the founding. I got there in the end.
You do not find the good ones by looking. You find them by walking slowly, in the right ground, behind something with a better nose than yours. Alessandria is precisely that sort of ground: a flat, unglamorous plain between two Piedmont rivers that almost nobody stops in, with four extraordinary things buried under it.
The Babolat Evo Aero is the better nose. A 102 square inch head, about 10.3 ounces strung, twenty-seven inches, an open spin-oriented string pattern, and the aerodynamic Aero beam borrowed from Babolat's flagship, so the frame slips through the air and the head arrives fast without you having to force it. It comes pre-strung, so no time is lost.
Light enough to carry everywhere from a first lesson to a full Sunday league, honest enough to tell you the moment you have missed the middle — and in Alessandria, where everything worth having is under the surface, that honesty is the whole tool.
Start on the Bormida bank, where the Savoy raised a six-pointed star fortress in the eighteenth century and nobody was ever vulgar enough to build on its glacis, which is why it is one of the very few in Europe still ringed by its own open ground. Then into town, where Borsalino has been turning rabbit fur into felt since 1857 and dressed half of Hollywood on the strength of it.
Then east to the flat plain at Marengo, where Napoleon very nearly lost in June 1800 and had the reporting rearranged by supper. Then back to the sober brick civic palace on Piazza della Libertà, standing from the years after the Lombard League founded the city in 1168 and named it to flatter a pope. Alessandria buries things well.
It is also perfect for a slow afternoon with a light racquet and no particular schedule.
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