The history of water vehicles at Fiera Milano

It’s easy to see flying as a victory for science, Leonardo, the Wright Brothers etc., but we are already familiar with air, while harnessing it as a support mechanism is a matter of applied physics. Our relationship with water is quite another thing. It’s the element we’re composed of, not the one we inhabit, or breathe – what a triumphant sense of progress, however, when we manage to inhabit it. Walking on water, though, let’s not even go there: from science we’re starting to verge on the supernatural, to shades of messianic.

Perhaps tracing this collective emotional picture is going a bit too far, especially when we start adding in the details of the trade fair landscape into which it is designed to slot (the smells, the food, the babble, the visual noise of constant publicity), but the images of Sample Fairs and post-war Saloni show that it isn’t so far-fetched.

There’s the presence of water, first of all: actual water at the trade fair in Milan – and we’re talking about boat shows organised bang in the middle of a city, bang in the middle of the Padano plain, not fountains – which, is already in itself a statement of technological progress that leads directly from the naumachia, or mock naval battles, of Ancient Rome to the age of techno polymers. Then there’s the form the water takes. There’s the dockyard created bang in the middle of the fairgrounds, which became the focus of entire exhibitions, not to mention Roberto Menghi’s now-iconic swimming pool, a theoretical volume of water suspended  above a plaza in a glass and concrete casket.