The giant benches that make adults feel like children

When US-born Chris Bangle moved from Germany to the tiny Italian village of Clavesana in 2009, he waved goodbye to a 17-year career as Chief of Design for BMW. It was a huge change for him, but his arrival also had an impact on his new neighbours, writes Dany Mitzman.
Fed up with designing cars for the elite, Chris Bangle wanted to create something for everyone, and something more in tune with nature. One idea he hit upon was a bench - a giant one, far bigger than a normal park bench - and together with his wife, Catherine, he set up The Big Bench Community Project.

The project encourages the installation of colourful benches in publicly accessible spots with breathtaking views. When you sit on one, legs dangling beneath you, you feel like a child again and experience the wonders of the world around you with a fresh perspective - that, anyway, is Bangle's intention.
The benches are also so big that there's plenty of space to share them, and to interact with friends or strangers.
There are now 19 privately financed benches, thanks to the Bangles' efforts, many in the Langhe, the hilly area of Piedmont, in north-west Italy, where Clavesana is located. But you won't find an app with a map to guide you to each location - part of the Big Bench experience is to discover them, and the views they offer, like treasure in a hunt.

Angelo and Daria came from Venice to see the benches, having read about them in the newspaper.
"They're quite hidden and not that easy to find," says Angelo.
"I imagined they'd be closer to the road but this is much nicer because you have to seek them out.
"The idea is lovely because you really feel like you become part of the landscape, which is something that doesn't normally happen. Sitting up here you ask yourself, 'Why am I so small and out of proportion?' You know it should be that way but you often take things for granted and think that you drive everything. Up here in this context you question this, and have to admit that you are actually less significant."

Rinalda doesn't have far to go to get to the Big Yellow Bench as it stands in the gardens of her family-run farmhouse hotel and restaurant, but most of the time she is too busy to clamber up on to it - in fact this is only the second time she has done it.
"It's true what people say: when you get up here you feel like a child again. I dream of having the time to sit here, relax and enjoy the view."

MariaGrazia Moncada
"Not touching the ground with your feet is a strong sensation because it really does take you back to being a child as it's not normally a sensation you have as an adult when you sit," says Paolo, sitting beside Chris.
"It's a very simple concept," he says. "Contemporary art is often difficult to understand but in this case the emotions are the same for everyone. It's not like when you say, 'Ooh, I can see a lion in this,' and someone else says, 'I can see a tiger.' Here it's the same for everyone, and I think that's its greatest success."

This pale blue bench was built by the Italian League of the Deaf from the town of Alba, famous for its truffles.
Corrado and his friends discovered the big benches while out walking and decided, as a community of 40 deaf people, they'd like to construct one. Their group self-financed with the help of other deaf communities - some donations coming from as far afield as Sweden. Many of them put their hand prints underneath the bench in different coloured paint.
Corrado hopes the silence of the place will encourage hearing people to think about what it would be to be deaf.
"This place can be useful for hearing people to come up and try not talking, try signing and understand what it means. And it's very connected to nature so you can come here and hear nothing," he says.
He has told his wife he would like his ashes to be scattered here when he dies.

The Big White Bench was built by the Torion Association, from the village of Vezza d'Alba. After clearing the hill of overgrown pine woods, the group discovered the old tower, which had been hidden by the woods. They chose it as the location for their bench.
Situated at the top of a high hill overlooking their village, they financed the bench, a matching picnic table just behind it, street lighting, and a water fountain for thirsty big-bench pilgrims.

The Big Apricot Bench in the village of Costigliole Saluzzo is the most recently built of the 19 big benches. The industrial equipment business owned by eight-year-old Noemi's grandfather made the bench's metal frame.
"I like the bench a lot because it's really high up," she says.

The Big Blue Bench, is located in the Gallo family vineyard, which dates back to 1795. Their only comment: "Cheers!"

Photographs by MariaGrazia Moncada

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Playing favourites: How do you pick Scotland's best book?

   Voting is now open for Scotland's Favourite Book, with 30 well-loved novels vying to be crowned the winner in a special BBC Scotland programme to be screened in October. The longlist of 30 titles was selected by a panel of experts, in collaboration with the Scottish Book Trust - among them PROFESSOR WILLY MALEY of the University of Glasgow. Here, he explores why we find it so tough to pick our favourite read, and reflects on a few of the Scottish works that didn't quite make the cut.

   Of course, we each have a favourite book and we think we know exactly what it is, but when we start making a list we soon realise we have more than one.

   We might find ourselves torn between a cherished tale from long ago that left a lasting impression and a more recent story that gripped our imagination and won’t let go.

   Is our favourite book a portrait in the attic that serves to help us stay the same? Or is it a strong flavour that changes with our taste? There’s always a beloved book left on the shelf like a younger self once we start expressing preferences. We are faced with having to choose between favourites, and that’s when it gets tricky.

   Some might say that the difference between a true book-lover and a fan of fiction is that the former never has favourites. Bookies pick favourites, the line goes, not book-lovers. But sometimes even book-lovers like us have to choose, especially if we’re asked nicely and believe it’s for a good cause – and encouraging reading is a great cause.

   In order to arrive at the 30 books on this list, the three members of the panel – Philippa Cochrane at the Scottish Book Trust, Jenny Niven at Creative Scotland, and myself – had to kill a few darlings of our own. Once we had settled on our selection we were left pondering the ones that got away, the read not taken.

   Neil Gunn’s The Silver Darlings was one of those treasured texts that missed the boat after much debate. Likewise, we had all been in favour of Leila Aboulela’s The Translator, a beautifully rendered novel that offers unique insights into faith and love, profoundly relevant to Scotland today. Aboulela described her novel as “a Muslim Jane Eyre”.

   It is certainly part of a rich tradition of revisiting or “writing back” to classic works of literature. Yet it didn't make the final cut, and this is only one instance of the many omissions that came about because we were spoiled for choice, pressed for time, and short of space.

   Those voting for Scotland’s Favourite Book will have their own suggestions for further reading, their own list of forgotten favourites, neglected novels they will want to dust off and pore over again.

   Literary lists have a long history, and are always bound up with old quarrels about what’s of real value and what’s merely in vogue. The classic that enthralls successive generations will outlive the one-hit wonder that fades quickly, like all fads. But this is not the whole story. Sometimes a book goes out of print that deserves a new lease of life. And what is a novel if not a story that stays new or can be read anew?

   Lists are great fun, and vital too for sparking serious discussion about our reading habits, the books close to our heart and the ones we feel we were taught or told to like.

   Back in 1984 when Anthony Burgess compiled Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, he added the words “A Personal Choice” to the subtitle, just to be clear that this was his own selection, lest his readers take it as tablets of stone.

   Burgess’s list was followed by Margaret Drabble’s Twentieth Century Classics in 1986, at which point Book Trust Scotland (as the Scottish Book Trust was then known) decided to get in on the act, and in conjunction with the British Council commissioned Edwin Morgan to write a brilliant little booklet entitled Twentieth Century Scottish Classics. Morgan’s list of the country’s finest fiction was as engaging, thought-provoking and up-to-date as his poetry.

   It’s 30 years since Morgan’s personal choice and much has happened in Scottish writing in the meantime. Some of the most striking developments are charted in the list of 30 books that you are now invited to choose from.

   Ours was not a personal choice but a three-way discussion. That made it more interesting, but it never made it any easier. Then again, we only had to choose 30 books from hundreds of potential starters.

   You now have the far harder but also far happier task of picking just one favourite from this formidable lineup. Our list is not a closed book but an open invitation. Go ahead, pick one. Who knows, yours might top the list.

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