Four stops before the checkout

Como, Italy

Stop one

Tempio Voltiano

Volkl Vostra V6 Tennis Racquet: There are many perspectives on Alessandro Volta, and pleasingly, nearly all of them agree. Born in this town. Built the first battery around 1800 – a stack of metal discs and brine-soaked cloth – and gave the world continuous current, which is why the unit is a volt and not something else. Now the delicate part. In 1899 a grand exhibition of his original instruments caught fire and a great deal of it burned. The electricity exhibition. Fire. I decline to characterise that, because characterising it would be unkind to several parties, some of whom have descendants. This white rotunda was then built in 1927 to house what survived and what was reconstructed. A temple containing, in all fairness, a partial recovery. History compromises. So, professionally, do I.

Stop two

Como Cathedral

Volkl Vostra V6 Tennis Racquet: Begun in 1396 and roughly three and a half centuries in the building, so it opens Gothic, turns Renaissance halfway up and concludes with a large dome of the eighteenth century, and I have heard it called incoherent. I would prefer to say it reflects a long conversation between reasonable people who never met. But the matter on which I must be genuinely diplomatic stands on either side of the front door: statues of Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger. Roman pagans, on a cathedral facade. The theological perspective is one perspective. The local perspective is that they were Como men. And the local perspective, I am obliged to report, won by a considerable margin. I take no position. I merely note the score.

Stop three

Funicolare Como-Brunate

Volkl Vostra V6 Tennis Racquet: A funicular of 1894, climbing some five hundred metres to Brunate, and observe that the carriage floors are stepped, because the vehicle is level with nothing and at peace with everything – an approach I have spent my career recommending. Brunate grew fashionable enough to fill with Liberty-style villas built by people escaping the heat down at the lake, and I will say only that the heat was real and the fashion was real and both positions are sincerely held. The mechanism, though, I would nominate as a model for the whole species. Two cars on one cable, each counterweighting the other, so that the car coming down does half the work of lifting the car going up. Descent funding ascent. I have chaired committees that never got there.

Stop four

Casa del Fascio

Volkl Vostra V6 Tennis Racquet: And now the item on the agenda everyone was hoping we might skip. Directly opposite a cathedral that took three hundred years stands a perfect white cube of glass and marble by Giuseppe Terragni, finished in the mid-1930s, with a covered courtyard and transparency as its governing principle, and it is one of the most studied buildings in the whole of modern architecture. It was built to serve as the local Fascist party headquarters. Architects the world over admire it and must deliver that second sentence immediately after the first, every single time, for ever. There are many perspectives. In this instance there are precisely two, they do not resolve, and no amount of my training makes them. Look at the proportions. Then look at the date.

The Como, Italy track

Volkl Vostra V6 Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

It is the soil. It is always the soil. People want a secret about the variety or the season or the moon, and the answer is that the ground either produces or it does not, and everything else is pruning.

The Volkl Vostra V6 is the point in this range where the ground starts producing. A 645 cm² / 100 in² head, 275 g / 9.7 oz unstrung, 68.5 cm / 27 inches, a 24-26-23 mm tapered beam and a 16×19 string pattern, with the balance at 33 cm — half an inch head light.

Read it as a whole and it is the sensible club racquet: light enough to swing all afternoon, thick enough in the beam to give free power, standard length so nothing feels unwieldy, and a 16×19 pattern with real spin access.

Volkl's RED Cell material and REVA damping sit underneath, taking the harshness out of contact, which is why this family has such a reputation among players nursing an elbow. It is the frame for an improving player who wants easy power and comfort in one object, without the fight a 320-gram stick demands.

Como is a growing place, whatever the postcards say.

The lake keeps the frost off, the hills behind it hold the heat, and the whole basin behaves like a good slope on a good aspect — which is why the Funicolare Como-Brunate has been hauling people five hundred metres up out of the summer heat since 1894, two cars on one cable, the one coming down doing half the work of lifting the one going up.

That is balance, and balance is the entire craft.

The town itself is patient in the way a plantation is patient. Como Cathedral was begun in 1396 and took about three and a half centuries, so it starts Gothic, turns Renaissance halfway up and finishes under an eighteenth-century dome, and nobody along the way suggested stopping.

On the lakefront the Tempio Voltiano, a small white rotunda of 1927, holds what survived of Alessandro Volta's instruments after the 1899 exhibition fire — the man was born here and built the first battery around 1800.

A frame like this one gets swung everywhere from a morning court under the Brunate hillside to a September evening on the Piazza del Duomo, and it is also perfect for the Como player who has to be back on the funicular by seven.

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Volkl Vostra V6 Tennis Racquet

Volkl Vostra V6 Tennis Racquet