SOUVENIR

Today we are examining a word dear to me, SOUVENIR, because besides being the title of a beautiful song (which few people know), the word in itself reminds me of travelling.

From the official Treccani encyclopaedia or by googling through search engines, the definition more or less remains the same: from the Latin subvenire, ‘to come to mind’, a noun use of the verb souvenir ‘to remember’, an object that one brings back, as a keepsake, from a place one has travelled to. 

The most glaring example is a fridge magnet with the name of a town, I remember, for example, buying a gecko from Formentera that still decorates our fridge, or a model of the Eiffel Tower that my daughter wanted to buy at the Champ de Mars Gardens, a piece of the (fallen) Berlin Wall from 1989, and finally the pricey, must have teddy bear from Harrods with the red jacket and headgear of the British Royal Guards (bearskin).

In general, the word souvenir is downgraded and often juxtaposed with another noun: junk, which equates to objects of little value. The cause of this downgrading, in addition to the object’s ugly appearance, could be traced back to the shops that sell them, located in tourist areas, with displays that often squat on public land in city centres and turn beautiful squares into messy souks.
I raise an idea, I think someone should invent a luxury souvenir shop in every European capital, a concept store following the model of ‘colette’ in Paris (which has unfortunately closed) with only designer/craftmanship objects representing the city being visited. 

In Rome, a precious metal coliseum made by Bulgari, in Naples, ties by Marinella and Ulturale with references to the city and the gulf, in London, a model of Tower Bridge flagged with Paul Smith’s coloured lines, and so on. Bonsoul, in its own way, is trying, by avoiding the ordinary, to make room for creativity, art and craftsmanship… Thinking this perhaps will incentivate you to take home a BonSoul Souvenir hoping this kind of “souveniring” will become a trend, and thereby reduce the made-in-china, somewhere else’s souvenir.