Gli automi dell Eden - Le Alternative -

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The articles of Cassandra Crossing I'm under license CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the "nom de plume" of Cassandra, born in 2005.

An article from ten years ago by Cassandra on automata.

This article was written on August 22, 2014 from Cassandra

Cassandra's loose change 328/ The automatons of Eden

The machines of the past can be a wonderful example of man's ingenuity and inventiveness. Which today is not always able to fully appreciate its absolute modernity.

Cassandra was tempted to push back these "pennies" by a dozen years, but out of total intellectual honesty, she underlines that the protagonist of these lines is not a fascinating five-year-old, but a sixteen-year-old already in the mood for engineering studies. At that time the bits were confined in mainframes sealed in computer centers, scattered around the world, often in turn subservient to analog entities such as human operators, cardboard card readers and paper tape punchers.

Our protagonist was, one day back in 1972, taken by his parent to a place he had never heard of before.

This place was located (and the imperfect is unfortunately obligatory) in Monte Carlo, at Villa Sauber, and was called “La collection de poupées et automates de M.me Madeleine de Galéa”.

In a beautiful Art Nouveau villa on the seafront, formerly the mansion of Mme de Galéa, a rich French widow who lived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the carefree owner spent the last 30 years of her life putting together one of the largest private collections of dolls in the world. And acting out of pure personal pleasure, he created it to his complete taste, without any pretense of antiquarianism or structuring.

In the last period, after it was necessary for her to buy the villa next door to be able to house the entire collection and show it to her guests at tea time, her interest shifted to automatons, which she began to collect with the same lightheartedness, but with significantly greater costs and difficulties.

At his death, in 1956, the collection of automatons had reached around eighty small but great masterpieces.

A few years later the heir donated the entire collection to the then Prince Rainier III of Monaco; it was finally organized and opened to the public in 1972, right at Villa Sauber.

So it was that our young engineer was led, obviously completely skipping the collection of dolls, directly into the automaton rooms. There, in that strange museum immersed in a conservative twilight, he was left speechless in front of large mahogany display cases that contained these very expensive and useless, and splendid for this very reason, animated objects.

The very delicate automatons actually worked for the visitors; of the most important ones exact replicas had in fact been made, and these could be seen in action.

And so”Zulma, the Snake Charmer” could play, breathe, move and enchant the reptile that enveloped him, and the poor “Harlequin scribe”, sitting at his table, could compose a love letter to his Colombina, dipping his quill pen into the inkwell. Acrobat bums, monkey orchestras, pianist-harpists and other more or less vivid memories of these incredible objects have accompanied him ever since, together with the "Hookah Smoker" who was the only one authorized to smoke real tobacco in a museum.

In the many years that have passed, the now engineer has tried to return to the museum, with the excuse of showing it to friends, as often as possible.

Sofia, now perhaps too big or too technologically advanced, was the last to benefit from it, albeit without particular enthusiasm. The next time however, like the Tardis, the museum of wonders had disappeared, and in its place there was a "normal" museum of modern art, where they knew nothing about what had become of the "Collection de Galéa".

This year I finally felt like insisting, and by interviewing a couple of museum employees and googling as much as I could, the truth came out.

The collection was very expensive to maintain and required continuous restoration, the Principality's orientation was to favor modern arts and there was a lack of space.

The “National Museum of Monaco” has therefore become the “New National Museum of Monaco”, and modern art has completely occupied it. Dolls and automatons have been, hopefully lovingly, boxed up and stored somewhere in the Principality, like Han Solo in graphite.

A couple of the most valuable automatons, Zulma and the Smoker, have been loaned for display (link), and another Zulma specimen was recently spotted during the sale (link) in a specialized auction. There is no trace of the Arlecchino, not even on Google.

The Principality is becoming more and more modern, and there is never enough space in museums (and the situation of another, the naval one, clearly demonstrates this); unfortunately due to the crisis, which in due proportion affects here too, all the projects for new museum spaces have been aborted.

However, entities such as Mme de Galéa's collection of automata cannot be built with an evolutionary museum process; they must be born already complete and perfect, and only a lucky individual can afford this every now and then in history.

If we were talking about other automatons, cellular ones of “Life”, the Galéa collection could be defined a “Garden of Eden”, a configuration that cannot be achieved through evolution of a world, but only built complete from the beginning by a “god”.

And so these small, large and delicate wonders will remain in some vault, waiting for modernizers to go out of fashion and yesterday's future to be rediscovered, revalued and necessarily also restored.

And who knows if Colombina received the letter from her beloved. If he hasn't finished her yet, the poor thing will have to wait a long, long time.

Marco Calamari