Studio Notebook
Short notes from Berwick and Trieste — coffee, place, memory, and the things that keep me curious. New pieces will appear here often.
When a Vault Gave Back Its Seeds
12 October 2026
Most insurance policies are never claimed, and we are glad of it. The strangest policy I know of is cut into a mountainside on Spitsbergen, an Arctic island about 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole. Behind a narrow concrete entrance, a tunnel runs deep into the rock to chambers kept at around minus eighteen degrees. On the shelves sit plain boxes of seed: wheat, rice, barley, lentils, beans and sorghum, well over a million samples sent from gene banks all over the world. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008, and the newspapers soon called it the doomsday vault. That makes it sound like a film set. It is really a spare key under the doormat for the whole of agriculture.
For seven years nobody asked for anything back. Then came the war in Syria. Near Aleppo stood the gene bank of ICARDA, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, which held some 150,000 samples of crops suited to hard, dry country: old wheats and barleys, lentils, chickpeas, and the wild grasses they descend from. By 2015 its scientists could no longer grow and share them there. But from 2008 onwards they had been quietly sending duplicates north.
So in September 2015 workers carried 128 boxes, about 38,000 samples, out of the Arctic chambers and shipped them to Lebanon and Morocco. They were sown that November. Within two years, fresh seed from those fields was travelling back to Svalbard to be put away again. The first withdrawal from the doomsday vault was not an apocalypse. It was a gardener asking the neighbour for the cuttings back.
The idea is older than the vault, and it was once paid for at a terrible price. In the 1920s and 1930s the Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov travelled the world collecting seeds, convinced that the future of food lay in the variety hidden in old farm strains and their wild cousins. His institute in Leningrad built one of the greatest seed collections on Earth. Vavilov fell foul of Stalin, was arrested in 1940, and died of starvation in prison in 1943.
Meanwhile, during the siege of Leningrad, his staff guarded the collection through the winter of 1941 and 1942 while the city starved around them. Several of them died at their posts rather than eat what they were protecting. When the rice specialist Dmitri Ivanov died in his office in January 1942, colleagues found thousands of packets of rice still in his care.
Both stories move me for the same reason. They are about people doing something dull, patient and unglamorous for a future they might never see: labelling envelopes, checking temperatures, posting duplicates to a cold island just in case. Nobody gets a medal for a backup. Even the vault needed one of its own. After an unusually warm Arctic autumn, meltwater trickled into its entrance tunnel. The seeds were never touched, but Norway rebuilt the entrance all the same.
Gardeners have always understood this. Anyone who has saved the seeds of a good tomato in a paper envelope, written the year on it in pencil and tucked it in a drawer has run a seed vault of one. The lesson I take from Svalbard is just as plain. Keep a copy of what matters, and keep it somewhere else: the photographs, the recipes, the stories your parents told, the variety in a field. Trouble rarely sends notice ahead, and the day you need the spare is never the day to start making it.
— Roby
When the Chess Machine Had a Man Inside
11 October 2026
In 1770 an inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen wheeled a wooden cabinet into the court of Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna. On top of it sat a life-sized figure in Ottoman robes and a turban, one hand resting on a long pipe, its eyes fixed on a chessboard. Kempelen opened the cabinet’s doors one at a time to show a crowd of gears and cylinders, closed them again, wound the thing up, and invited the court to play. The figure, soon known simply as the Turk, beat almost everyone.
For more than eighty years it toured Europe and America. The stories say it played Benjamin Franklin in Paris and Napoleon at Schönbrunn, and that when Napoleon tried an illegal move, the Turk swept the pieces off the board. Learned men wrote pamphlets about how a machine could possibly reason. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a long essay in 1836 arguing that it could not, and that somewhere in that box there had to be a man.
He was right. The cabinet hid a strong chess player who slid along on a rolling seat as the doors were opened, followed the game through magnets under the board, and worked the arm with levers, by candlelight, in a space hardly bigger than a cupboard. The Turk was superb theatre and real engineering. It just wasn’t the engineering everyone thought it was. It burned in a museum fire in Philadelphia in 1854, its secret by then an open one.
The name outlived the machine. In 2005 Amazon launched a service called Mechanical Turk, where companies post small jobs that computers still find hard, such as labelling a photograph or checking a sentence, and people around the world do them for a few cents each. Jeff Bezos called it “artificial artificial intelligence”. It was an honest joke, and a useful one.
Today’s AI is not a conjuring trick, and nobody is crouched inside the server rack. The chatbots and image makers really do compute their answers. But there are people inside them all the same, only spread out across time and the map. There are the millions of writers whose words the systems learned from. There are the workers, many of them far from Silicon Valley and modestly paid, who sorted and labelled the training data. And there are the raters who read pairs of answers and marked which one was better, so that the machine could learn what people prefer.
That, I think, is the lasting lesson of the old Turk. When a machine dazzles you, the useful question is not only “Can it think?” but also “Where are the people?” Not to spoil the wonder, but to see it clearly. The people inside decide what the machine knows, what it leaves out, and whose taste it has absorbed. They deserve credit and fair pay, and their work deserves scrutiny too, because their blind spots travel along with their skill.
Poe saw through the Turk by watching carefully and refusing to be hurried by the show. It is still a good habit. Admire the clockwork, by all means. Then look for the seat on rollers.
— Roby
When a Donkey Cannot Choose
10 October 2026
Philosophers have kept a donkey in their stable for about seven hundred years, and it has never once eaten. Put it, hungry, exactly halfway between two bales of hay. The bales are equally fresh, equally sweet, equally near. The donkey has no reason to prefer the left over the right, and so, the argument goes, it stands there politely until it starves.
The animal is known as Buridan’s ass, after Jean Buridan, a fourteenth-century teacher in Paris, although the donkey does not appear anywhere in his surviving writings. It seems his critics invented it to tease him about his ideas on the will. The puzzle itself is much older. Aristotle mentions a man who is just as hungry as he is thirsty, standing at the same distance from food and drink, and so stuck where he is. Al-Ghazali, in the eleventh century, imagined a man offered two dates exactly alike and said he would simply take one, because the will can choose where reason finds no difference. Spinoza later admitted that a person caught in such a perfect balance might really die of hunger and thirst. When asked whether such a person should be thought an ass rather than a man, he answered, with a perfectly straight face, that he did not know.
Real donkeys, I am glad to say, eat. But the puzzle refuses to stay on the farm. Engineers meet it inside every computer. A circuit that must decide whether a signal arrived just before or just after the tick of a clock can, if the signal lands at exactly the wrong instant, hover between a zero and a one for longer than anyone would like. They call it metastability. The computer scientist Leslie Lamport gave the general rule a fitting name, Buridan’s Principle: a machine that must turn a smooth, continuous world into a clean yes or no cannot always do it within a fixed time. Engineers do not abolish the donkey. They make the perfect balance very unlikely, and they give the circuit a moment longer to fall one way or the other.
And we, it seems, have built the donkey’s dilemma into ordinary life. Forty brands of toothpaste. A wall of olive oils. An evening spent scrolling through films instead of watching one. The psychologist Barry Schwartz called this the paradox of choice. In a well-known experiment in a Californian grocery store, a tasting table with twenty-four jams drew more curious shoppers than a table with six, yet far fewer of them went home with a jar. Later studies have not always found the same effect, so it is not a law of nature, but most of us recognise the feeling of standing in front of a shelf, quietly losing.
Here is what I take from the hungry donkey. The real danger is not choosing badly. It is treating two equal things as if the difference between them mattered. When the bales are truly alike, the clever move is not to think harder but to toss a coin and start chewing. Keep your careful thinking for the choices where something real is at stake: who to trust, where to live, what to spend your years on.
There is a small freedom in that. Not every decision is a test of character. Some are just hay.
— Roby
When a Steel Box Shrank the World
8 October 2026
Look at almost anything on your kitchen bench, the kettle, the jar of olives, the phone charger, and there is a good chance it spent part of its life inside a plain steel box about twelve metres long. Nobody photographs these boxes. They are stacked on ships, trains, and trucks like children’s blocks, and they may be the most important invention of the last century that nobody bothered to admire.
Before the box, a ship was loaded by hand. Sacks, crates, barrels, and bales went aboard one at a time in nets and on the backs of men, and came off the same way at the other end. A cargo ship could spend as long tied up in port as it did at sea. Goods were damaged, goods went missing, and every handling added cost. I grew up in a port city, and the old waterfront was a place of ropes, shouting, and sweat, a whole small society organised around lifting things.
In 1956 an American trucking man named Malcom McLean tried something simple. He took the bodies off his truck trailers and loaded them, sealed, onto an old tanker called the Ideal X, which sailed from Newark to Houston in April with fifty-eight of them on deck. At the other end the boxes were lifted off and driven away without anyone touching what was inside. In his book The Box, the economist Marc Levinson reports McLean’s own sums: loading loose cargo cost almost six dollars a ton, and loading his boxes cost about sixteen cents.
But the idea did not change the world straight away, and this is the part I find most interesting. For years different companies used boxes of different sizes, with different corner fittings, which could not be stacked together or lifted by each other’s cranes. The real revolution came at the end of the 1960s, when international standards fixed the sizes and the corners. After that, a box packed in Melbourne could ride a train, a ship, and a truck in three countries and arrive at a door in Trieste unopened. The cleverness was not in the steel. It was in the agreement.
We like to tell the story of technology as a story of geniuses and gadgets. Yet so much of modern life runs on dull agreements: the width of railway tracks, the voltage in the wall, the rules that let a letter or an email find its way across the planet. A standard is a promise between strangers that the thing you send will fit the thing they have. It is invisible exactly when it works.
The box also had a price, and it would be dishonest to skip it. Whole crafts of dockworkers disappeared, the old waterfronts emptied, and ports moved out to wide flat yards beyond the edge of town. Cheap shipping made factories in faraway places possible, with all the good and the harm that came with them. Today the biggest ships carry more than twenty thousand boxes at once, and when one of them gets stuck in a canal, the whole world notices.
So here is the lasting point I take from a steel box. When you want to understand what really changes the world, look past the shiny inventions and ask what people quietly agreed on. Progress often arrives not as a bright idea but as a common size.
— Roby
When a Country Plans to Outlive Its Land
7 October 2026
What is a country made of? Ask a child and you will get a map: a coloured shape with a line drawn round it. Ask a lawyer and you will get the checklist written into a treaty signed in Montevideo in 1933. A state needs a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the ability to deal with other states. Four boxes, and the second one is ground you can stand on.
Tuvalu is quietly testing that second box. It is a scatter of nine low islands in the Pacific, home to around eleven thousand people, and most of its land sits only a few metres above the sea. In 2021 its foreign minister, Simon Kofe, recorded his speech for the Glasgow climate summit standing knee-deep in the ocean in a suit and tie. A year later he announced something stranger: Tuvalu would build a digital copy of itself, its islands, its records, and its customs, so that the nation could carry on even if the water won.
Then came the paperwork, which is where history usually gets serious. In 2023 Tuvalu amended its constitution to declare that its statehood will continue in perpetuity, whatever happens to its territory. The same year it signed a treaty with Australia called the Falepili Union, a Tuvaluan word for good neighbourliness, which opens a path for up to 280 Tuvaluans a year to come and live, study, and work here. A country was planning, calmly and legally, for the possibility of having no ground at all.
In 1882 the French historian Ernest Renan gave a lecture at the Sorbonne with the plain title “What is a nation?” He rejected the easy answers: not race, not language, not religion, and not geography. A nation, he said, is a soul made of two things, a rich inheritance of shared memories and the present wish to go on living together. He called it a daily plebiscite. Montevideo counts the land. Renan counts the people who keep choosing each other.
I have some sympathy for Renan, because I come from a city that changed its flag more often than its coffee. Trieste was Austrian, then Italian, then for seven years after the war a Free Territory belonging, more or less, to nobody, and then Italian again. The ground never moved. What held people together was the dialect, the recipes, the arguments in the cafés. And every emigrant knows the rest of the lesson. You can carry a country across an ocean in a suitcase and a kitchen and a way of saying hello, and it stays alive for exactly as long as somebody keeps it.
None of this makes the sea less cruel. The best outcome for Tuvalu is not a beautiful digital archive but islands that stay above the water, and that depends on choices made in much bigger countries than theirs. Still, the lasting point is worth keeping. A border is a line on a map, but a nation is a promise people make to one another, and land is only the place where that promise usually lives.
— Roby
When a Machine Is Asked to Forget
6 October 2026
Jorge Luis Borges once wrote about a young man named Ireneo Funes who, after a fall from a horse, could forget nothing. He remembered every leaf on every tree, and every time he had seen it. It sounds like a gift until Borges delivers the sting: Funes was hardly capable of thought, because to think is to forget differences, to generalise, to let a thousand particular dogs become simply a dog. A mind that keeps everything cannot see anything.
I have been thinking about Funes because our newest machines have a version of his problem, turned inside out. A large language model learns by soaking up an enormous library of human writing and folding it into billions of numbers. Nobody files a sentence away in a drawer marked with your name. The learning is smeared across the whole system, the way salt disappears into soup. That is why the machine can talk so fluently about almost anything, and it is also why it is so hard to make it forget.
And people do ask it to forget. In 2014 Europe’s highest court recognised what became known as the right to be forgotten, and the later data laws gave people a right to have personal information erased. With an ordinary database that is a delete key. With a trained model it is closer to asking a cook to remove one egg from a cake already baked. Engineers call the problem machine unlearning, and the only fully reliable method is still the clumsy one: bake the cake again without the egg.
Nietzsche thought forgetting was not a weakness but a kind of health. He pictured cattle grazing, untroubled by yesterday, and admitted that a person could not live like that. Yet he insisted that without some active forgetting there could be no happiness, no hope, and no fresh start. Human memory agrees with him. We keep the shape of a grandmother’s kitchen and lose the exact date of the visit. We remember that a friend once wronged us and, with luck, forget how loudly we answered. Forgetting is how a long life stays light enough to carry.
So here is the strange inversion. For most of history, the worry was that knowledge would be lost: libraries burned, languages faded, the old people died with the stories still in them. Now we are building things that cannot easily lose anything, and we have discovered that forgetting was never only a failure. It was also mercy, privacy, and a second chance.
Perhaps the lasting point is this. A good memory, human or machine, is not the one that holds the most. It is the one that knows what to keep, what to let soften, and what a person has the right to take back.
— Roby
When the Ship Is Rebuilt Plank by Plank
5 October 2026
p>Plutarch tells a story about a boat that refused to die. The Athenians kept the ship Theseus had sailed home from Crete, and whenever a timber rotted they took it out and fitted a sound one in its place. They kept doing it for generations, until the philosophers began using the ship as a puzzle. If every plank has been replaced, is it still the ship of Theseus, or only a very loyal copy?
Thomas Hobbes, two thousand years later, made the puzzle crueller. Suppose someone collected every discarded plank and quietly rebuilt the old ship in a shed. Now there are two vessels. One has the original wood. The other has the original history, the harbour, the crew, the habit of being called by that name. Which one would you salute?
I like this riddle because it is not really about boats. It is about us. Our bodies are rebuilt on uneven schedules: blood cells last a few months, the lining of the gut a few days, while many of the neurons we think with stay with us for most of a lifetime. The popular claim that we become an entirely new person every seven years is a myth, but the general point survives. We are less like a statue and more like a river that keeps its name.
Japan has a beautiful answer to the riddle. At Ise, the great shrine is taken down and rebuilt on the neighbouring plot roughly every twenty years, a custom kept, with some long interruptions, for well over a thousand years. The wood is new each time. What is old is the knowledge: carpenters teach apprentices how to cut the joints, and the shrine survives by being remade rather than by being preserved. Its age lives in hands, not in timber.
An emigrant knows this ship from the inside. I left one harbour and spent a lifetime replacing planks in another country: a new language for the shop counter, new birds, new jokes, a different way of saying goodbye on the telephone. People sometimes ask whether I am still Italian or now Australian, as if one ship had to be the real one and the other a model in a shed. I have stopped choosing. The wood changed. The voyage did not.
Perhaps that is the lasting point. Identity is not what you are made of, but what you keep doing with what you are made of. A ship stays a ship while someone keeps sailing it, and a person stays themselves while they keep repairing, remembering, and setting out again.
— Roby
When the Desert Keeps the Sun
4 October 2026
p>A solar farm in a desert looks like an answer. At noon it is. At dusk it is a question the grid has to ask someone else.
Xinjiang’s a
When Offline Is Not a Failure4 October 2026
A network used to be a place you went. Now it is a weather system that follows you from room to room, and a quiet screen can feel like a storm that has not yet decided to break. We call the break a failure — no bars, no sync, no little cloud with a tick. I am not sure the word is honest. Offline is often only a room returning to its own size.
Technology sells continuity as kindness. Mail waits, maps refresh, videos resume exactly where you left them. That is useful. It is also a training. The hand reaches for a signal the way it once reached for a light switch, and the mind learns to treat a pause as a problem. Engineers have language for uptime; painters have another: a canvas that never dries never becomes a picture. Philosophy has said versions of this for a long time — that a life needs intervals the marketplace will not schedule for you. The new twist is only the expectation that every interval should still be connected.
I notice it when a useful tool becomes a habit of reaching. From Trieste I carried a port city’s respect for weather that could stop a ship without insulting the captain. From Australia I learned another classroom: long roads where the phone goes thin and the country does not apologise. Painting taught me that emptiness is not always a gap. Sometimes it is the ground that lets the next mark mean something.
I do not claim to hate the net, and I do not pretend the old quiet was pure. Kinship here is quieter. People have always built bridges and then had to decide when to stand on the bank. A message that cannot travel for an hour is not always a crisis. It is sometimes a reminder that the world still has rooms without an audience.
So here is my morning note: the next time the bars disappear, ask whether anything essential has actually broken. Offline is not what happens when technology fails you. It is what happens when a place asks you to be present without reporting home.
— Roby
When Attention Is the Last Luxury
3 October 2026
A river used to decide where you could stand and look. Now the looking arrives without travel, and it never quite finishes. Feeds, prompts, alerts, and half-finished tabs queue for the same quiet place behind the eyes. What used to be scarce was information. What is scarce now is the capacity to stay with one thing long enough for it to become yours.
Attention is not a mood. It is a kind of spending. You give minutes, and you cannot spend them twice. Economists have language for scarcity; painters have another: the eye that tries to hold every edge at once loses the picture. Philosophy has said versions of this for centuries — that the examined life requires pauses the marketplace will not gift you. The new twist is only the volume. Endless invitation is not the same as endless capacity.
I notice it when a sentence arrives already dressed for speed, asking to be skimmed rather than kept. From Trieste I carried a port city’s habit of waiting for the right ship, not every ship. From Australia I learned another classroom: long light that rewards the person who does not hurry the looking. Language works the same way. A word read twice often means more than ten words read once.
I do not claim to have invented this worry, and I do not pretend the old virtues are obsolete. Kinship here is quieter. People have always protected a corner of silence — a book, a walk, a cup that asks nothing — and then had to defend it against louder rooms. Luxury used to mean gold and silk. The quieter luxury is unbroken time.
So here is my morning note: the next time the world offers you fifty doors at once, close forty-nine on purpose. Attention is not what is left after the noise. It is what you choose before the noise starts counting.
— Roby
When a Machine Learns to Hesitate
2 October 2026
A calculator never doubts. You give it two numbers and it returns a third with the calm of a stone. What we now call artificial intelligence is stranger, because it can sound unsure, change its mind, and still be wrong with perfect manners. These systems do not know in the way a person knows. They predict the next likely piece of a pattern, trained on enormous amounts of human writing, speech, and pictures. The fluency is real, and so is the gap behind it. A sentence can be graceful and still rest on nothing.
We are tempted to treat a fluent answer as a finished thought. The field moves quickly, and the names wander. Some people say model, some say assistant, some say mind, and none of those words quite fits. Still, the kindness is the same. Use the machine where pattern helps, and keep the judgment where a life, a fact, or a promise is at stake. A wrong sum is easy to spot. A wrong explanation, written in your own tone, is easier to trust than it deserves.
I think of that whenever a question arrives already half answered by a screen. Painting taught me that speed is not the same as seeing. Language is the same craft under different pressure. From Trieste I carried a port city that lived by translation: cargo, dialects, ledgers, and the habit of asking what a word was really carrying. From Australia I learned another classroom: English is generous, and generosity can hide a missing step. A good reader slows down. A good user of these tools should do the same.
I do not claim kinship with the laboratories, and I do not pretend the old fears are new. Kinship here is quieter. People have always built instruments that extend attention, from the abacus to the printing press, and then had to decide what not to hand over. A machine that hesitates in its wording is not yet a person hesitating in conscience. One is a statistical pause. The other is responsibility.
So here is my morning note: the next time an answer arrives fully dressed, ask it to show its work, and keep the last word for yourself. The useful machine is not the one that sounds most certain. It is the one that leaves you more awake than you were before you asked.
— Roby
When Edges Are Lost on Purpose
1 October 2026
From Berwick, lays ordinary Australian light across a shoulder that refuses to be outlined, and my brush hesitates before the temptation to fence every form. Soft fact first: painters speak of lost-and-found edges — places where one shape merges into another so gently that the boundary disappears, and places where the boundary returns, sharp enough for the eye to land. Soft companion craft fact from the studio manuals: a hard edge is an abrupt transition of value or colour that pulls attention; a soft edge is a gradual blend; a lost edge is so quiet that two neighbouring shapes share almost the same value and the contour seems to vanish into atmosphere or shadow. The picture keeps its sense. The outline simply stops insisting.
Soft fact. Hard feeling: not everything that exists needs a fence. Soft hedge, as always: terminology wanders. Some teachers say hard and soft; others prefer lost and found; a few arrange a spectrum from sharp through firm and soft to lost. Still, the kindness is the same. Keep the hard edges where the gaze should rest — a cheekbone catching light, a cup’s rim, the bright seam of a collar — and let secondary passages dissolve so the painting can breathe. Soft companion lore often repeated: the eye cannot hold a whole scene in focus at once. Painting that remembers this feels more like looking than like diagramming.
I think of that whenever I glance past the easel and the room rearranges itself without asking every object to declare its border. Painting taught me that outlining everything is a kind of nervous honesty — accurate, and somehow less true. From Trieste I carried harbour mist that taught the same lesson without a lesson: stone, water, and sky trading edges until only a few lights remained certain. From Australia I learned another classroom: south-east morning that softens the far gum and keeps the near leaf crisp, as if the light itself were editing.
I do not claim kinship with the bravura edge-work of Fechin or the quiet dissolves of a Vermeer interior. Kinship here is quieter. I simply refuse to treat every contour as a duty. Soft fact. Hard feeling: a lost edge is an act of permission — permission for form to borrow atmosphere, and for the viewer’s eye to complete what the brush has kindly left unfinished.
So here is my morning note from the south-east: the next time a shape asks to be fully enclosed, consider losing part of its edge on purpose. Soft fact. Hard feeling: some of the most convincing forms are not outlined. They are found again only where the light decides they matter.
— Roby
When Colour Is Dragged, Not Poured 30 September 2026 From Berwick the south-east window lays ordinary Australian light across a darker panel I left alone yesterday, and my hand reaches for a brush that is almost dry. Soft fact first: a scumble is a thin, often semi-opaque or broken layer of lighter colour dragged over a darker underlayer that has been allowed to dry, so the undercolour peeks through in patches. Soft companion craft fact from the National Gallery’s own glossary: a scumble is lighter in tone than what lies beneath — the optical opposite of a glaze, which is typically darker and translucent. A glaze pours light through colour. A scumble skims light across darkness and lets the darkness answer back. Soft fact. Hard feeling: some colours are not poured. They are dragged. Soft hedge, as always: painters argue gently over how dry the brush must be, how opaque the paint, and whether “scumble” and “dry brush” are cousins or the same cousin wearing two hats. Still, the principle holds. The upper film does not seal the underlayer like glass. It breaks, feathers, and leaves breath. Soft companion lore often repeated in the studios: Venetian hands such as Titian and Tintoretto used related broken lights for fabric and ray; Rembrandt, soft lore again, for hair and aging skin. Soft hedge on the word itself: the technique is older than the English name, which soft dictionaries place in the eighteenth century, perhaps near an old sense of skimming. I think of that whenever Paola glances at a passage that looks misted rather than varnished — not unfinished, only half-revealed. Painting taught me that covering is not the only kindness. From Trieste I carried a city that understood skimmed splendour: bora light dragging pale across dark Karst stone, never quite hiding the grey beneath. From Australia I learned another classroom: south-east morning that asks a cooler veil to cool a warm umber without extinguishing it. Soft companion optical fact from the same National Gallery note: a light mixture scumbled over a dark underlayer will tend to read cooler, even a little bluer, than the same mixture over a pale ground — smoke against trees, not smoke against sky. I do not claim kinship with Venetian silk or Rembrandt’s late mirrors. Kinship here is quieter. I simply refuse to treat every lighter passage as a pour of translucency. Soft fact. Hard feeling: a scumble is an act of permission — permission for yesterday’s dark to remain visible, and for today’s opaque skim not to erase the conversation so much as roughen it into weather. So here is my morning note from the south-east: the next time a colour asks to be lighter without becoming blank, consider dragging it, dry and broken, across what is already honest underneath. Soft fact. Hard feeling: some of the softest lights are not poured on. They are allowed to skim, and to leave the underlayer speaking through the gaps. — Roby
When Light Walks Through Paint
29 September 2026
From Berwick the south-east window lays ordinary Australian light across an unfinished panel, and my mind keeps returning to a patience that oil still teaches better than any clock. Soft fact first: a glaze is a thin, translucent layer of colour laid over an opaque underpainting that has been allowed to dry. Soft companion craft fact from the conservation room: light passes into that thin film, meets the brighter layers beneath, and returns through the colour on its way back to the eye. The painting, as the old manuals almost say, learns to glow from the inside.
Soft fact. Hard feeling: some colours are not placed. They are postponed. Soft hedge, as always: not every pigment is equally translucent in oil, and not every workshop used the same recipes. Still, the principle holds. Red and yellow lakes, certain copper greens, ultramarine — these are among the colours that stay open in oil, letting light travel through them rather than bouncing off their surface like a slammed door. Medieval painters, soft lore often repeated, used such films over metal leaf to imitate gemstones, enamel, and stained glass. Later, northern painters such as Jan van Eyck refined the same optical kindness into flesh, cloth, and quiet rooms that seem lit from within.
I think of that whenever Paola glances at a panel I have left alone for a few days — not abandoned, only waiting. Painting taught me that hurry flattens. From Trieste I carried a city that understood delayed splendour: harbour light arriving twice, once on the water and again on the stone. From Australia I learned another classroom: south-east morning that asks a crimson to earn its depth rather than announce itself in one opaque shout. Soft companion fact from the Mauritshuis studies of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring: translucent glazes modify opaque underlayers on the background, the headscarf, even the lips — colour arriving as a second thought that deepens the first.
I do not claim kinship with Van Eyck’s panels or Vermeer’s Delft rooms. Kinship here is quieter. I simply refuse to treat every passage as a single decision. Soft fact. Hard feeling: a glaze is an act of trust — trust that yesterday’s underpainting was honest enough to receive today’s light, and that today’s thin colour will not hide the work beneath so much as bless it.
So here is my morning note from the south-east: the next time a colour asks to be richer, consider letting light walk through it instead of covering the road. Soft fact. Hard feeling: some of the deepest hues are not piled on. They are allowed to arrive late, and to keep a little sky inside them.
— Roby
When a Word Refuses English
28 September 2026
From Berwick the south-east window gives me ordinary Australian light, and yet certain Triestine words still refuse to sit quietly in English. Soft fact first: the speech of my city — triestin — is a Venetian dialect that learned, over centuries beside the Gulf, to borrow without apology. Soft companion fact from the language maps: German and Slovene neighbours left fingerprints; Greek and South Slavic sailors left others. A fork can be a piròn, from the Greek for the same stubborn utensil. A chair can be a carèga, carrying another Greek echo into a kitchen that thought it was only Italian.
Soft fact. Hard feeling: some words are not puzzles. They are rooms. Soft hedge, as always: no dictionary can bottle a childhood, and I do not pretend that every Triestino agrees on every shade. Still, when I reach for English equivalents, something useful falls through the net. Bonora is early morning, yes — but also the temperament of getting up before the city has decided who it is. Impizàr is to light a flame, and yet in the mouth it feels closer to coaxing fire into company than to striking a match. Soft companion lore from home: even imborezà — that lit-up, slightly mad cheer the bora leaves behind — travels poorly into “excited.” Excited is a thermometer. Imborezà is weather that has entered a person.
I think of that whenever Paola hears me slip into dialect over the sink and asks, gently, what I meant. Painting taught me that some colours refuse the nearest tube. Language is the same craft under different pressure. From Trieste I carried a city that was never only one tongue — Habsburg ledgers, Adriatic cargo, Venetian music in the street. From Australia I learned another classroom: English is generous, but generosity is not the same as exactness. Soft fact from the poets’ shelf: Virgilio Giotti, soft lore often repeated, is remembered as the greatest poet of Triestine dialect — not because he collected odd words like souvenirs, but because he let the dialect vibrate with ordinary life until the ordinary became intimate.
I do not claim Giotti as a studio mate, and I do not write dialect verse. Kinship here is quieter. I simply refuse to treat a hometown word as a failed translation. Soft fact. Hard feeling: when a word resists English, it is sometimes protecting a feeling that English would flatten. A canvas remembers pressure in the stroke; a dialect remembers pressure in the syllable. Both are forms of attention that do not want to be paraphrased too quickly.
So here is my morning note from the south-east: the next time a Triestine word refuses to sit neatly in English, do not hurry it into a synonym. Soft fact. Hard feeling: some words are not waiting to be translated. They are waiting to be kept.
— Roby
When the Canvas Speaks First
27 September 2026
From Berwick the south-east window does not wait for a finished painting. Soft fact first: before most of the colour arrives, many painters give the white support a thin toned wash — an imprimatura, from the Italian for a first priming. Soft companion craft fact from the conservation room: historically that oil-bound tint could cut the thirst of a chalk or gesso ground, soften or lock an underdrawing, and offer a middle tone against which lights and darks could be judged. Ochre, sienna, umber, a quiet grey — the palette of patience rather than of spectacle.
Soft fact. Hard feeling: a blank white canvas can be a shout. It insists that every mark be a decision, and the eye, startled by glare, often invents contrast it has not yet earned. A toned ground is a softer invitation. Soft hedge, as the manuals and the forums gently disagree: some writers reserve imprimatura for a translucent oil veil over gesso; others use it more broadly for any coloured priming. Vasari, soft lore often repeated, already knew the Italian word for an oil-bound second ground. Karel van Mander’s Dutch cousins spoke of a thin primuersel through which the drawing still peeped, “half painted” before the real work began. Soft hedge again: terminology wanders; the kindness of a midtone does not.
I think of that whenever Paola glances at a fresh panel leaning against the warm stone wall — not white shouting, but a quiet ochre listening. Painting taught me that beginning is not emptiness. From Trieste I carried a city that never started from blankness: stone already had colour, harbour light already had a temperature, and a morning on the Karst arrived already half composed. From Australia I learned another classroom: south-east light that asks the canvas to meet it halfway before the crimson and the cool neighbours arrive.
I do not claim kinship with Rubens’s streaky brown-grey washes, or with the seventeenth-century Netherlandish habit of letting a coloured ground show through as midtone and unity. Soft fact from the scholars of those grounds: a toned preparation helped painters work more openly, more efficiently, and with a tonal harmony white panels alone did not always give. Kinship here is quieter. I simply refuse to treat white as the only honest start. Soft fact. Hard feeling: sometimes the picture has already begun speaking before the first “real” stroke — and the painter’s job is to answer, not to interrupt.
So here is my morning note from the south-east: the next time a white support stares back at you, consider giving it a thin first colour. Soft fact. Hard feeling: a canvas that speaks first is not impatient. It is offering you a middle of the road, so the lights and the darks know where home is.
— Roby
When a Shadow Borrows Colour
26 September 2026
From Berwick the south-east window does what it always does: it lays a quiet argument across the studio floor. Soft fact first, the sort painters learn with their eyes rather than their books — a shadow is almost never only grey. Look long enough and it borrows. A crimson cloth lends a warmer hush to the dark beside it. A green lawn outside the glass tips a cool green into the shade under a chair. Light does not end where an object begins. It ricochets, softens, and arrives again as colour you almost missed.
Soft fact. Hard feeling: the mind prefers a simple story — light is bright, shadow is grey — and the eye must gently refuse it. Soft companion craft fact from the studio manuals: if the light is warm, the body of a shadow often cools; if the light is cool, the shadow may warm. Winsor & Newton put the same lesson plainly for anyone who has reached for black too quickly: mix a touch of the complementary into the local colour and the dark stays alive. Yellow darkened with purple keeps more truth than yellow ruined by black. Soft hedge, as always: nature is freer than any colour wheel. Still, the principle holds like a good habit.
I think of that whenever Paola walks past the easel and the room rearranges itself. Her jumper, the warm stone wall, the pale floor — each one throws a quiet loan into the next shadow. Painting taught me that grey is sometimes a confession of not having looked. From Trieste I carried a city of hard light and sudden shade, where the Karst sun made colours argue in doorways. From Australia I learned a gentler classroom: morning light that asks you to notice what is bouncing before you invent what is missing.
I do not claim to have invented reflected colour. Kinship here is quieter. Generations of painters learned the same stubborn tenderness — that a dark passage can hold borrowed warmth the way a room holds conversation. Vermeer’s interiors, soft lore often repeated, live as much in their tempered shadows as in their pearls of light. I do not paint like Vermeer. I simply refuse to treat a shadow as an absence. Soft fact. Hard feeling: darkness that borrows is still a form of company.
So here is my morning note from the south-east: the next time a dark asks for room on the canvas, do not reach first for grey. Look for what the light has lent. Soft fact. Hard feeling: some shadows are not holes in the picture. They are colours that arrived by the long way home.
— Roby
When Blue Cost More Than Gold
25 September 2026
From Berwick the studio window gives me ordinary Australian light, and yet my mind keeps returning to a colour that once travelled farther than most painters ever would. Ultramarine. Soft fact first: the name is almost a passport stamp. From the medieval Latin ultramarinus — beyond the sea — it named the blue ground from lapis lazuli, a stone whose finest seams were mined in the mountains of what we now call Afghanistan and carried, slowly and expensively, into European workshops.
Soft fact. Hard feeling: for centuries the best grades of that blue could cost as much as gold, sometimes more. Renaissance contracts treated ultramarine the way they treated gold leaf — a separate line, a patron’s purse, a spoonful of heaven priced by the ounce. Cennino Cennini, writing for painters in the early fifteenth century, called it the most perfect of colours. Soft companion fact from Florence’s ledgers: high-grade ultramarine could run ten to fifteen times the price of azurite, the more ordinary blue. So workshops reserved the precious powder for the figure who could justify the extravagance. The Virgin’s mantle. Marian blue. Not because blue was gentle. Because blue was costly, and cost was a form of reverence.
I think of that whenever I squeeze a tube of modern ultramarine onto the palette. Synthetic ultramarine arrived in the eighteen-twenties and made the colour almost democratic. What once required a caravan and a contract now sits beside my crimson without asking for a banker. Paola smiles when I hesitate over a blue passage — she knows the Italian in me still wants the colour to earn its place. Painting taught me that cheapness is not the enemy of beauty, but forgetfulness is. A colour that once crossed oceans deserves at least a second look before it becomes only “the cool one next to the warm one.”
From Trieste I carried a city that lived by ports and ledgers, where cargo and culture shared the same quay. From Australia I learned a quieter studio economy: light is free, attention is not. Vermeer, soft fact, spent ultramarine even on beams and upholstery, as if domestic quiet deserved the same mineral dignity as a sacred robe. I do not paint like Vermeer. Kinship here is quieter. I simply refuse to treat blue as background noise. When a pigment has a biography that long, the brush should arrive a little humbler.
So here is my morning note from the south-east: the next time a blue asks for room on the canvas, remember that it once cost more than gold and travelled beyond the sea to get here. Soft fact. Hard feeling: some colours are not only mixtures. They are journeys that learned how to stay.
— Roby
When Friendship Travels by Letter
24 September 2026
From Berwick the Yarra Valley arrives as a short map of green. This afternoon my mind does not stop at the studio window. It travels a little north — toward Bulleen, toward Heide, toward rooms where an Australian painter who chose Italy still keeps company with a friend he mostly met on paper.
Ken Whisson and John Foubister: Going Back In remains on view at Heide Museum of Modern Art through 22 November 2026, in the Kerry Gardner & Andrew Myer Project Gallery and the Albert & Barbara Tucker Gallery, included with museum admission. Soft facts from Heide’s own page: a chance meeting in 1984 between the Italian-based Australian modernist Ken Whisson (1927–2022) and the regional South Australian artist John Foubister (1954–) grew into a lifelong friendship conducted by post and telephone. Soft fact. Hard feeling: some of the deepest studios are shared without sharing a wall.
I have not walked those galleries today. I am looking toward them from the south-east, the way a painter looks toward a subject before the first mark. Whisson — Lilydale-born, later of Perugia for decades — carried Australia into Umbrian light and kept sending work home. Foubister answered from another kind of quiet. Guest curator Anna Zagala has framed the show as a meditation on exchange, artistic influence, and camaraderie. Painting taught me the same lesson in smaller ink: a letter can hold a colour the telephone cannot, and a voice can hold an urgency the letter softens.
Paola knows the mood when friendship is in the house — the studio goes a shade more patient, as if the next canvas might want to listen before it speaks. From Trieste I carried a city that lived by correspondence as much as by harbour. From Australia I learned how artists keep each other honest across distance: not with spectacle, but with the stubborn habit of answering. Soft companion fact from the public record of Whisson’s life: he lived and worked in Perugia from the late 1970s into the 2010s, and still the Australian rooms kept receiving him. That is a kind of loyalty I recognise.
I do not claim Whisson or Foubister as studio mates. Kinship here is quieter. Two painters, different lives, one long conversation — that is enough to look toward. A canvas remembers the hand that mixed the pigment; a letter remembers the hand that paused before sealing it. Both are forms of attention. Both refuse the loneliness that distance pretends to invent.
So here is my afternoon note from the south-east, looking toward Bulleen: if you can, walk into Going Back In before late November takes those rooms back to ordinary quiet. Stand with a friendship that travelled by letter and wire. Let two painters remind you that Italy and Australia are not only places on a map. Sometimes they are simply the distance a conversation learns to cross.
— Roby
When a Poster Holds the Night
24 September 2026
From Berwick the northern suburbs arrive as a map of Italian evenings. This morning my mind does not stop at Faraday Street or Nicholson Street. It travels a little further still — toward Coburg, toward the old Pentridge walls, toward a cinema foyer where Italian light is hanging on paper.
The 2026 ST. ALi Italian Film Festival is on now in Melbourne through 15 October, with thirty-three films moving through Palace screens, the Astor, the Kino, Cinema Nova, and more. Soft companion fact from the festival’s own Melbourne page: exclusive to this city, a free exhibition — Italian Cinemas in Melbourne: Vintage Movie Poster Exhibition — fills the foyer of Palace Pentridge from 18 September through 15 October. Original Italian-language cinema posters from the personal collections of Santo Cilauro and Palace founder Antonio Zeccola. Soft fact. Hard feeling: before a film can move, a single image must stop you.
I have not stood in that foyer today. I am looking toward it from the south-east, the way a painter looks toward a subject before the first mark. Painting taught me that a good surface holds more than it shows. A poster is the same craft under different pressure — colour, composition, and a promise compressed into one frame. Paola knows the mood when cinema is in the house: the studio goes quieter, as if the next canvas might want to borrow a lobby’s patience.
The exhibition sits inside a larger Melbourne story the festival page tells gently. When television arrived in 1956, suburban cinemas nearly emptied. Enterprising Italian Australians took over struggling leases and screened Italian films to families who dressed for Saturday night the way one dresses for company. The Metropolitan in Brunswick. La Scala in Footscray. Soft fact. Hard feeling: a migrant city kept its movie culture alive not only with projectors, but with posters that knew how to lure the eye across a foyer.
I do not claim those collectors as friends. Kinship here is quieter. From Trieste I carried a city that loved spectacle and silence in the same breath. From Australia I learned how Italian nights remade Melbourne’s rooms. A canvas remembers mood before plot. A vintage poster remembers the same: the face, the colour field, the invitation to enter. Research partners thread through without needing a fanfare — ACIS and the University of Melbourne — keeping the ledgers of how Italian cinema in this town became more than entertainment. It became belonging, dressed up and on time.
So here is my morning note from the south-east, looking toward Coburg: if you can, walk into Palace Pentridge before mid-October and stand with those posters. Or take a seat somewhere the festival is still screening Italian light across a dark room. Let a single image remind you that culture often arrives first as looking — and only afterward as story.
— Roby
When Rome Arrives in Carlton
23 September 2026
From Berwick the city to the north-west arrives as a map of Italian rooms. This morning my mind stopped at Faraday Street and a kitchen table. This afternoon it travels a few quiet blocks further — to Melbourne Museum on Nicholson Street, Carlton, where Rome has crossed an ocean without asking me to leave Victoria.
ROME: Empire, Power, People remains on view through Sunday 25 October 2026. Soft facts from the Italian Cultural Institute of Melbourne and Museums Victoria’s own notes: a Melbourne-exclusive gathering of around one hundred and eighty original Imperial Roman artefacts — statues, mosaics, frescoes, jewellery, and objects from the everyday — dated largely from the first to the third century CE, drawn from the Museo Nazionale Romano and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze. Designed by Museums Victoria with Contemporanea Progetti; curated with Dr Federica Rinaldi, Dr Sara Colantonio, and Dr Carlotta Caruso. Soft fact. Hard feeling: empire is usually too large for a single room. Here it has been asked to fit.
I have not walked those galleries today. I am looking toward them from the south-east, the way a painter looks toward a subject before the first mark. Paola knows the mood — the studio goes a shade quieter when Italy arrives in Melbourne, not as nostalgia, but as company. From Trieste I carried a city that sat at the hinge of empires and ports. From Australia I learned to measure distance differently: not kilometres alone, but how long it takes for stone to speak again in a new climate.
Painting taught me that power is not only marble and spectacle. Power is also the small thing that survives — a fragment of colour, a profile cut in stone, a mosaic tile that still holds afternoon light. The exhibition promises emperors and markets, luxury and labour, the political and the spiritual side by side. That balance feels true to me. A canvas remembers both the grand gesture and the patient hand. Rome, in these rooms, seems invited to do the same.
Partners thread through the story without needing a fanfare: the Italian Cultural Institute of Melbourne, the Consulate, and others who keep the bridge between Italy and Australia from becoming only a slogan. Soft companion detail, not the centre: on Saturdays through late October, CO.AS.IT. offers guided tours in Italian — a chance to hear the empire in the language that still sits under my own tongue when I dream of home.
So here is my afternoon note from the south-east, looking toward Carlton once more, this time for Rome: if you can, walk into ROME: Empire, Power, People before late October takes the rooms back to ordinary quiet. Stand with something that travelled farther than most of us ever will. Let an empire remind you that history is not only what ruled — it is also what a people made, wore, worshipped, and left behind for strangers to meet with open eyes.
— Roby
When Memory Sits at the Kitchen Table
23 September 2026
From Berwick the Carlton streets arrive as a remembered smell — espresso and tomato, Lygon talking over itself, Faraday quieter by a few doors. I have walked that world for decades without claiming every room. Today my mind stops at CO.AS.IT., 199 Faraday Street, where a fellow Italian-Australian painter has left the kitchen table standing in the gallery.
Recurring Echoes is Liliana Di Lizio Barbieri’s survey of twenty-five years of practice, extended now through 17 October 2026. Free entry. Tuesday to Friday ten until five; Saturdays one until five. Soft facts from the house page. Hard feeling: someone has taken pasta, textiles, timber, and paper — the ordinary grammar of Italian-Australian homes — and asked them to speak about migration, resilience, and belonging.
I do not know Liliana personally. Painter-to-painter kinship does not require a shared studio or a shared dinner. It only requires recognising the same stubborn tenderness: the way a humble object can hold a crossing better than a speech. Painting, photography, installation, sculpture — her rooms gather what families leave on tables and in drawers. I recognise that instinct. My own canvases lean toward mood and light; hers, from what the exhibition describes, lean toward ritual and craft. Both of us, though, are listening for what travels when people travel.
From Trieste I carried a city of wind and coffee. From Australia I learned a quieter kitchen: Paola’s pots, Sunday sauce, the small patience of making a home that still remembers another shore. Faraday Street has always been one of Melbourne’s Italian compass points. Lygon is the loud cousin; CO.AS.IT. is the room where culture keeps its quieter ledgers — language classes, archives, and now this survey of making. Soft fact. Hard feeling: heritage is not a museum label. It is something living, reshaped by time, memory, and the hands that keep making.
So here is my morning note from the south-east, looking toward Carlton: if you can, walk into Recurring Echoes before mid-October. Stand with the pasta and the cloth and the paper. Let a fellow Italian-Australian remind you that memory does not always need a monument. Sometimes it only needs a kitchen table, and an artist willing to listen.
— Roby
When a Sphinx Comes Home to Miramare
22 September 2026
From Berwick the Adriatic is a colour I keep in my pocket. Paola knows when I have been thinking of Trieste — the studio goes quieter, and the crimson I favour finds a cooler neighbour. Today the pull is Miramare: not the postcard castle on the cliff, but the Stables below it, where something that left for Vienna in the nineteenth century has been invited home.
From 2 April through 1 November 2026, the Stables of Miramare Castle host A SPHINX LURES HIM. Maximilian of Habsburg and the Egyptian Collections between Trieste and Vienna. More than one hundred artefacts. Opening hours ten-thirty to eighteen-thirty; last entry at eighteen. Soft facts. Hard feeling: a sphinx that once travelled with an Archduke’s dream is standing again where the Gulf can almost hear stone breathe.
I grew up knowing Miramare as a place of light and wind, not of Egypt. Yet Maximilian’s passion for Ancient Egypt was never a tourist whim. The exhibition — curated by Massimo Osanna, Christian Greco, Cäcilia Bischoff, and Michaela Hüttner — tells how a personal collection became a modern idea of the museum: heritage held for a community, not only for a court. Collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Museum returns a significant portion of what went to Vienna; loans from Trieste’s Civico Museo d’Antichità J. J. Winckelmann deepen the local thread. Trieste of the nineteenth century traded, travelled, and collected under that same fascination. Soft fact. Hard feeling: my city has always been a hinge between worlds.
Painting taught me that objects carry journeys. A canvas remembers the hand that mixed the pigment; an antiquity remembers the hands that lifted it across seas. Maximilian’s Egyptian pieces moved between Trieste, Mexico, and Vienna. The museum he imagined at Miramare was never built. Still, the itinerary of looking continues — from elite enjoyment to shared knowledge, from private dream to public room. I recognise that shift. It is the same generosity I want when a painting leaves my studio and finds a stranger’s wall.
Tomorrow evening, if you are near the Throne Room, the Grandi Incontri series opens with Professor Francesco Longo speaking from Miramare toward the cosmos at seventeen hundred. A quiet companion note, not the centre of the day. The centre is older stone: a sphinx that has come home for a season, and a Triestino in Berwick who still measures home by how a castle catches the Adriatic light.
So here is my afternoon note from the south-east, looking north in memory: go if you can, before November takes the Stables back to ordinary quiet. Let the sphinx remind you that collections, like families, sometimes return by the long way.
— Roby
When a Leaf Asks for Exactness
22 September 2026
Spring in Melbourne does not only lengthen the light. It also fills the galleries with plants drawn as if the page itself were a field notebook. From Saturday 19 September through Sunday 4 October, the Friends of the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne are staging the eighteenth Art of Botanical Illustration — TABI — at Domain House on Dallas Brooks Drive, with a hybrid companion online. Ten in the morning until four each day: a quiet corridor of leaves, petals, and the kind of patience painting seldom advertises.
I am not a botanical illustrator. My canvases prefer mood to taxonomy. Still, I recognise the craft. Botanical art is beauty under oath — every vein accountable, every shadow earned. The exhibition’s hero image this year is Lioudmila Volodina’s Erythrina acanthocarpa, and the rooms around it hold work from Australia and abroad. Richard Barley MBE opened the show; profits return to the Gardens. Soft facts. Hard feeling: someone sat with a specimen until looking became love, and then became line.
From Berwick I think of the wattle already arguing with winter, and of Trieste’s Adriatic plants painted into memory the Italian way — not as decoration, but as company. Precision and freedom are not enemies. One teaches the other what it can afford to leave out. When I next pick up a crimson, I want the leaf beside it to have been truly seen first.
So here is my morning note from the south-east: if you can, walk into Domain House before 4 October. If you cannot, the virtual rooms are open. Either way, let a plant remind you that attention is the first pigment.
— Roby
Clear Bora, Dark Bora
21 September 2026
In Berwick the wind is usually polite. It arrives, rearranges a few leaves, and leaves you alone with the canvas. In Trieste the wind has a name and a temperament. We call it the bora — a cold, dry, north-easterly rush that tumbles off the Karst into the Gulf, arrives in gusts (the refoli), and reminds you that a city can have a character the way a person does.
Triestini know two moods. Bora chiara — clear bora — arrives under a hard blue sky, scours the air until the Adriatic looks newly washed, and leaves you breathless and oddly cheerful. Bora scura — dark bora — brings cloud, rain, sometimes snow, and a different kind of seriousness. Same wind, different face. In dialect we even have a verb for the state of mind it leaves behind: imborezà — animated, lit up, a little mad in the best Triestine sense.
I grew up with both. Ropes and chains stretched along the sidewalks so you could cross without becoming a kite. Stones on roofs so the tiles would stay put. Narrow streets that are not only medieval habit but wind-craft. Gusts that make the television news at home, and records that sound like exaggeration until you have felt one — figures that climb past 150 kilometres an hour, and stories of anemometers that simply gave up.
From Australia I miss that honesty. Melbourne will give you a southerly change and call it drama; Trieste gives you a wind that has shaped how people walk, how they build, how they talk about beauty. Discover Trieste puts it plainly: Trieste is the city of the bora, and the bora is the wind of Trieste. Writers treat it almost as a character. I treat it as a teacher. Painting taught me to watch light. The bora taught me to watch force — and to hold the rope when the street insists.
So here is my afternoon note from Berwick, looking north in memory: not every hometown leaves you a coffee school. Some leave you a wind. Both are worth carrying.
— Roby
When Berwick Catches Up With the Sky
21 September 2026
In Australia we already call it spring. The Bureau of Meteorology flips the calendar on the first of September — neat quarters, tidy statistics — and by mid-month the light in Berwick has begun to argue with winter. Magpies rehearse. The garden finds its voice. My studio window starts telling the truth earlier each morning.
The sky, though, keeps its own appointment. Astronomical spring for the Southern Hemisphere arrives on Wednesday, 23 September 2026, at about 10:05 in the morning Melbourne time — when the Sun sits over the equator and Earth’s tilt is, for a moment, neither toward nor away. Equal night, the Latin says. Almost equal, the physicists add: the Sun’s disc and the bending of light in the atmosphere stretch daylight a little past twelve hours, so the true balance (the equilux) slipped past Sydney and Melbourne over the weekend just gone.
I like living between these two clocks. One is useful. One is beautiful. From the easel I notice the second first — how the morning light on the warm stone of the studio softens, how the crimson I favour in a canvas needs a cooler neighbour when the day lengthens. Painting is mostly paying attention. Seasons are the same craft, written larger.
Paola and I walk the same Berwick paths we always have. The Italian in me still half-expects spring to arrive with a Mediterranean flourish; Victoria prefers a quieter negotiation — wattle, then blossom, then the long climb toward the December solstice. Two days from now the sky will make it official. The Bureau already has. My brushes are somewhere in between, waiting for the light to decide what the next painting wants.
So here is my small equinox note from the south-east: spring is not only a date. It is a gradual permission. The days are about to outrun the nights in earnest. I will meet them at the window.
— Roby
Trieste Still Teaches the Cup
20 September 2026
In Australia we argue about oat milk with the seriousness of a senate inquiry. Fair enough — a café is a kind of parliament. But when I think of coffee as a school, my mind goes home to Trieste.
This month the city finished the fifteenth Ernesto Illy Master in Coffee Economics and Science: twenty-seven students from twenty countries, nearly a roll-call of the tropics where the plant actually grows — Ethiopia to Peru, Brazil, Kenya, Indonesia, and more. Since the first intake, nearly three hundred professionals from over forty nations have passed through that classroom. Not a branding exercise. A pipeline. Agronomy, chemistry, sensory work, roasting, markets, sustainability — the whole chain treated as one craft.
Why Trieste, still? Because the port never forgot that green beans are cargo and culture at once. Because illy and the universities kept insisting that taste without knowledge is fashion, and knowledge without taste is paperwork. From Berwick I watch Australian coffee culture bloom — excellent baristas, beautiful milk art — and I feel proud. Then I remember that the next generation of growers, traders, and scientists is being formed beside the Adriatic, where my own story began.
The timing is not gentle. Green coffee prices have risen sharply in recent seasons — roughly three times the long-run norms many of us grew up with — under pressure from climate and markets. Andrea Illy and others have said plainly that the classroom must widen as the pressures widen. Soft fact, hard feeling: when the plant struggles, the city that understands the bean becomes more necessary, not less.
October will say it out loud. The International Coffee Convention lands in Trieste on 19–20 October; TriestEspresso follows on 21–23 October. Science in the morning, business in the afternoon, espresso in the blood either way.
So while we debate the flat white, Trieste is still doing what it has always done best: teaching the world how the cup is made, from soil to sip. That is a hometown I can carry to Australia without nostalgia and without apology.
— Roby
