Advertisement

Comic capers in Bologna, magic mushrooms and farewell to the fridge

<span>Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo</span>
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Italian comic capers

Does Italian have an equivalent of the expression “la France profonde”?

I wondered about this as I walked around Bologna, a city where tourists are so relatively thin on the ground I was able to commune with an altarpiece by Giotto undisturbed by any other human being for a full 10 minutes and where the crowd surging out of its historic theatre, the Arena del Sole, looked so wonderfully old-school glamorous, that they might have come from a movie by Vittorio De Sica.

But I was not in Bologna for sightseeing, nor even for tortellini in brodo. I was there to judge a new category – comics – for the BolognaRagazzi, the awards made every year ahead of the city’s children’s book fair, the biggest such gathering in the world.

Does this sound like fun? Well, it was and it wasn’t. In the overlit conference centre where the international jury met, the 180 books in the running were laid out on tables as far as the eye could see and for a moment I felt faint-hearted.

But then I remembered how endlessly surprising the world of comics is, how beautiful and how intelligent. These graphic novels came from every country and covered every subject.

At their best, we did not need to know the language in which they were written, so deftly did they tell their stories, and we gave the young adult award to The Short Elegy by Animo Chen, a Taiwanese artist.

A special mention, though, must go to Kahe heli vahel by Joonas Sildre, an Estonian comic for teenagers that is – imagine it – a biography of that country’s great national hero, the minimalist composer Arvo Pärt.

Magic mushrooms

I am not, alas, a descendant of Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, the Victorian botanist whose work on psychoactive fungi may have inspired the scene in Alice in Wonderland where, at the suggestion of a hookah-smoking caterpillar, our heroine eats a mushroom that makes her grow bigger and smaller.

But as the daughter of a mycologist and something of a mycophile (translation: a complete weirdo) myself, I could hardly wait to see Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi, a new (free) exhibition at Somerset House in London.

Sometimes weird and sometimes wonderful, it didn’t disappoint. Here is Beatrix Potter’s exquisite watercolour of a shabby parasol mushroom, collected by her in 1893; here, too, is Carsten Höller’s Mushroom Suitcase (2008), in which red-and-white-spotted fly agaric mushrooms sprout from some flashy hand luggage by Rimowa (no, me neither).

Best of all, though, is the gift shop, which caters to every possible mycophilic need, from coffee to cushions to cocktails. I bought a pack of playing cards, each one decorated with a different species. The two jokers are the deadly poisonous death cap (Amanita phalloides), and the trumpet of the dead (Craterellus cornucopioides), which is edible and, at its best, comes with delicious top notes of black truffle.

Ditch the fridge

At the hairdresser, I read in an interiors magazine of an alarming new last-days-of-Rome trend: the wellness kitchen.

The gist of it is that “bulky cupboards” and “noisy appliances” are on their way out. A fridge? Don’t be daft. Healthy food that is “visible, easily accessible and beautiful” can be a “game-changer”.

What you need now is a glass-fronted, climate-controlled cabinet with a trough of water running through it, the better to keep your vegetables and herbs – don’t forget the herbs! – alluringly on show and fully dew-dropped.

• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist