Trying to catch the wind may seem a futile task, but inside the Bora museum in the Italian city of Trieste there is proof that it can be done, as long as you have the right container. On the shelves of the crammed exhibition space, you can find an offshore breeze from Barcelona in a perfume decanter, a Bohemian downwind in a mustard jar, an angry mistral in a plastic water bottle and a humid Swiss föhn in a test tube.
Pride of place is taken by a vintage year of the wind that gives the museum its name, captured in a metal paint-sample tin: a bora from February 1954, when cold gusts dive-bombed from the karst hills into the Adriatic sea at a record speed of 171 kilometres an hour.
The collection of 400 bottled winds is museum director Rino Lombardi’s lifetime project: a practical joke he came up with more than 25 years ago and kept going until it turned into an accidental work of art, a monument to an invisible force that has shaped the landscape and culture of the continent but is rarely put centre stage. “In Trieste, the wind is not just a wind – it’s an institution,” says Lombardi.
