01
Stop one
Salerno Cathedral (Duomo di San Matteo)
Prokennex Ace Station Black Ace Pro Tennis Racquet: Quietly through here. This arcaded courtyard is the best sound in Salerno at two in the morning — all those reused antique columns, pulled off older buildings, standing in the dark holding up a church that was never theirs. Robert Guiscard the Norman put it up in the ten eighties, over the relics of Saint Matthew the evangelist, which lie down in the crypt. And down there too is Pope Gregory the Seventh, who took on an emperor, lost his own city, and died here in exile in ten eighty-five. The lamps in the crypt stay burning all night; they are the first thing I check and the last. Ten thousand times down those steps, near enough. He has never once complained about the hour.
02
Stop two
Giardino della Minerva
Prokennex Ace Station Black Ace Pro Tennis Racquet: Nobody comes up here after dark, and they are wrong not to, because the smell is stronger at night — that is simply how these plants work. This terraced garden on the hillside below the castle belonged to the Silvatico family and served the medical school of Salerno, the first great one in western Europe, where physicians taught from Greek and Arabic texts long before the universities got themselves organised. The medicines were grown right here on the slope, in labelled beds arranged by the qualities they were believed to hold. At three in the morning the water is still running through the channels, the same channels, the same sound those physicians walked out into. Nothing else up here makes a noise. The rosemary, I will tell you honestly, does most of the work.
03
Stop three
Castello di Arechi
Prokennex Ace Station Black Ace Pro Tennis Racquet: Best shift in the city, this one. The Lombard duke Arechis the Second moved his seat to Salerno in the eighth century and fortified this hill, and every ruler afterwards simply kept adding stone to what he had started — walls, towers, several hundred metres above the town. And from up here you understand the point in about four seconds: the castle was never what mattered. The sea approaches are what mattered, and somebody has been watching them off this rock every night for twelve hundred years. Wind comes through the empty window openings and makes a noise I have given up trying to describe to people in daylight. Below, the lights around the gulf never all go out at once. Somebody down there is always awake with me.
04
Stop four
Lungomare Trieste
Prokennex Ace Station Black Ace Pro Tennis Racquet: Last stretch, and my favourite. Palms the whole length of it, benches, and the port still working away at the far end at every hour there is. In winter this promenade and the centre behind it fill up with the Luci d'Artista, the artist light installations the city has been mounting since the mid two thousands — tunnels of light, constellations strung between the trees. And here is the thing only the night people ever see: they do not switch them off all at once. They go out in stages, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, so for about an hour you get a half-lit city going dark in sections, like something very large settling down to sleep one limb at a time. Then it is just me and the port.
Let us be honest about what you are buying, because the marketing will not be. The Black Ace Pro is the top of ProKennex's Black Ace line — the same family that sells at 315, 300 and 285 grams — and it is built around a compact head and a 16×19 string pattern, which is the pattern every control frame in history has used because it works.
The layup is what ProKennex calls Aurelian Carbon with Kinetic Mass, and the shaping is their FlexLogic profile. Grip sizes run L1 through L4, 4⅛ to 4½.
The Kinetic System is the part that is actually different, and the part I will defend. Inside the frame are chambers of loose mass that shift on impact, absorbing shock and vibration rather than transmitting it up the arm.
ProKennex has been building frames this way for decades, long before anyone was selling arm-friendliness as a feature, and the claim they make for it — less fatigue, better recovery, so you are still playing properly in the third set — is the one claim in tennis I have stopped rolling my eyes at.
Who it is for: a player with real control who wants to keep their elbow. Salerno will understand the transaction. The medical school here was the first great one in western Europe, teaching from Greek and Arabic texts while the rest of the continent was guessing, and the physicians grew their own drugs on a terraced slope below the castle because they did not trust anyone else's supply chain either.
You'll get use out of this everywhere from the courts behind the Lungomare Trieste to whatever municipal surface Arechi's hill is hiding.
And by the way, it's also perfect for the thing Salerno genuinely loves — walking the seafront from end to end every single evening, in company, at a speed that is not walking so much as being seen — because a frame that does not leave your forearm burning is a frame you can carry the length of a promenade without complaining.
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