Miriello Grafico

I heard about Memolio, a new twist on on-line publishing for small flip-book-like brochures. It’s similar to Moocard, but combines a method of chicago-screwing the corners of 24 pages of images together to form a small cool, tight picturebook.  I created a dry-run booklet, using images from our village in Italy, Radicondoli. Aside from the images printing on the dark side, and the cost per unit being somewhat prohibitive (about $22 each), it’s still a very cool and thought-provoking concept.Now how to use it ???

Preview the Memolio Radicondoli sample in detail here or click on the photo.

The Slow Food movement started in Torino Italy and touched a nerve across the globe. Eat locally, support the local economy and build real community, around food.  For most Italians is not something that needs to be learned, but rather something they’re striving not to forget.

Douglas Gayeton is a writer,  photographer, ice cream maker and now author as very well. He’s  just published a very cool book called  SLOW LIFE IN A TUSCAN TOWN.

Douglas in his on-line interview, explained how the project started this way, ” I was eating at a restaurant near my apartment in Pistoia, Italy and after the meal, I went into kitchen and I said to the chef, “Everything was very good. I wish I could cook like this.” And he said, “Come back tomorrow morning.” So, the next morning at eight o’clock, I met him at a caffé and we went to a butcher. We went to buy all these vegetables. Then, I found myself working for six months at his restaurant. At the time, PBS asked about doing a piece on Slow Food, which was going to be a documentary with a bunch of talking heads. The people in my town, they all lived philosophy of Slow Food, but they didn’t even know what Slow Food was. I tried to capture that.”

I’ve already invited him to our house in Italy so we can compare stories and discoveries. Hope it happens.

The photography and overdrawing by Gayeton are a great visual approach for the text. It’s published by Welcome Books.  rm

I have the pleasure of periodic visits to Italy. There’s an 84 year old farmer (contadino) named Guido in our village of Radicondoli. While the world would have seemed to have passed by this wise and savvy contadino over the past decades, a case can be made for the exact opposite. Guido Castellini’s quality of life has always been high, if you measure it by the quality of food on his table and the sharpness of mind after eight plus decades. And the barter tradition that exchanges his glorious eggs for Carlo’s meat or Salvatore’s cheese for his olive oil, is suddenly the stuff of new and progressive blogs underwritten by WIRED. Guido Castellini has been working one plot of glorious land for the past six decades slyly aware that one day we’d likely be back full circle to celebrate in his definition of “quality of life”.

Pass me those artichokes and fresh ricotta would you please . . .

Enjoy this article from John Tierney of the NY Times on a related take on a similar subject.

Salve, Ron

In the September 08 edition of Wired magazine there’s a small article on a very cool little Germany company called Fluidforms. These guys have wired together Google maps + CAD cutting technologies and a web interface to allow some very amazing one-of-a-kind things to be made. I just went to their site www.fluid-forms.at and ordered a topographic CAD cut wooden bowl-form of our home village in Italy- Radicondoli (Si).

The Fluidforms site allows you to enter a place or zip code like Google Maps, but then renders the location into topo form so you can preview it’s potential as a sculptural object. A very innovative combination of technology that creates a company “brand” that’s both customer centric and entirely made-to-order.

Here’s what they say about themselves: “Each part of the earth is unique in then design of her heights and depths. Fluidforms enables customers to have a piece of this singularity on a table at home. The different contour lines of a chosen area define the shape of the bowl. An expedition into landscapes and cities only known from hiking. The earth becomes a sensory experience, that can be filled with the fruits of the earth.”