Meryle Secrest - The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: Ibm, the Cia, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World’s First Desktop Computer

Carnival time in Ivrea, Italy, is celebrated each year as in many other parts of the world as a riot of exuberant excess before the sobering arrival of Lent. It is sometimes referred to as a carnival, and at others as the Festival of the Red Caps, and the Battle of the Oranges. Both are relevant because this annual ritual can be traced back for at least a thousand years. Historians believe it began as a fertility rite. Remnants of its ancient past can still be discerned; it ends, as it always has, with the burning of a tree, thought to refer to the ancient idea that if you wanted a bountiful spring, someone, or something, had to pay for it.

The custom of wearing a red cap came about during the French Revolution, in sympathy and solidarity. But when, or why, oranges became part of the proceedings no one really knows. That sunny, succulent fruit is not grown in these parts, which tend to have very cold wintersIvrea, a town in Piedmont, is picturesquely silhouetted right up against the Alps. But some kind of battle is certainly part of the legend that has been handed down, a fable that insinuated itself into the festival in the nineteenth century and gradually took over. Time moves so slowly in Ivrea that what is measured in decades in most parts of the world is calculated in centuries here. As the story goes, a tyrannical baron in the Middle Ages demanded such a ruinous increase in taxes that his subjects were close to starving. One night the baron, exercising his droit du seigneur, took a millers pretty daughter to bed. She was all prepared. At, one assumes, just the right psychological moment, she pulled out a dagger and expertly removed his head. A battle was joined. Soldiers were summoned to punish the citizens of Ivrea, only to be defeated by a handsome general who commanded a superior force. The town was saved and the pretty millers daughter destined to be celebrated by generations of grateful citizens who have no future and for whom past glories loom large.

To visit there for a few weeks is to return with vivid impressions: green water bubbling and churning in canal locks, an empty piazza, silent in the noonday sun, shutters banging, a mist on the mountain peaks. A girl in white goes by on a bicycle, silhouetted against black foothills, there are plastic flowers on a window ledge and graffiti on the windows of an abandoned hotel. Old men amble along the river walks by day. At night teenagers smoking cigarettes huddle, chatter, and silently slip away. Ducks gather in freeform patterns against the river banks. Lanterns creak and groan and bats wheel over the chimneys. The whole town is transfixed, as if a painted ship upon a painted ocean.