Andrea Gandino

Concerning the importance of language: for things that can have a large potential audience, always, always, always (got it? always!), provide at least a little translation to english. English is the latin of our days; it is understood, to various degrees, by the majority of people, hence it is the safer and most effective way to convey concepts and informations to people coming from different countries.

Why am I saying this? The labels found on every showcase at the National Museum in Prague were written in czech only. That was disappointing. Instead, at the Museum of the History of Medicine, in Vienna, the labels were both in german and english, with different fonts and colours used too. Pleasing, so thumbs up all the way.

I so much liked the typographic stuff in both cities. Prague, with its gothic flavour, has some amazing signs and emblems, really. Vienna too was great from that point of view; in particular the city’s subway signs are all perfectly readable being written in beautiful bold Helvetica.

I loved some of the stuff I’ve found at the MUMOK, Vienna’s museum for modern art, and some great manuscripts and letters at the aforementioned museum of medicine history, which unfortunately I wasn’t able to photograph.

A last thought that is actually an advice. We visited the Schönbrunn castle, right? Beautiful park, really, with amazing colours and ornaments. Inside the imperial apartments, instead, I felt like they were way too glitzy, and somewhat overdone. This is something I did not felt, for example, when I was in Versailles, a couple of years ago — and that’s quite remarkable since Schönbrunn was actually built to sort of compete with it.

While I’m not sure about the causes of this entirely subjective feeling (tiredness, weak light inside the rooms, the summer heat), and while I should reckon that my taste is different from other people’s taste, especially if those people lived centuries ago, one thing is for sure: overdoing things is never good.