A visit today to one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world – Acqua Alta in Venice, which has entire gondolas full of books inside, and opens out directly onto the canals of Venice. Thus, inside the bookshop – as well as the sounds of people browsing and chatting – you can hear the […]
A special treat today – this is one of my favourite field recordings from recent months, a real hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment. In the world-famous, incredibly busy St. Mark’s Square in Venice (Piazza San Marco), the typical sounds of cafe bands, crowds and chatter are interrupted by the thunderous clang of the bells from the Campanile bell […]
We’ve created an interactive sound map of Venice dating back to the year 1500, by overlaying our reimagined sounds of the Serenissima Repubblica onto Jacopo de Barbari’s iconic map of the city from above (currently housed at the British Museum). Explore this amazing map while listening to our reimagined sounds from the city below…
We’re into February already, which means it’s time for our first roundup of 2015’s best sounds so far. On our wintery journey, we start in a bitterly cold Turin as the clocks strike and fireworks herald the coming of 2015, and throughout the month we’ve explored New York City, Venice, Cardiff, Canterbury, Trento and even […]
Back to our spiritual home of Venice, and the wonderful 2014 exhibition ‘L’illusion della luce’ at Palazzo Grassi next to the Grand Canal. The exhibition explored light in various forms, but featured an unusually high level of sonic interest in amongst its exhibits. The first was an exhibition composed of video screens with various talking […]
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"As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of [the city] as it is today should contain all [the city's] past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the bags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls."
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Grand Prix winner and Coup de Coeur winner, Académie Charles Cros
