While some destinations are rethinking their relationship with tourist souvenirs, with bans on “tacky” items underway in Barcelona and Sicily, other places around the world are literally selling cans of thin air to visitors. The latest entry into the canned air market hails from Italy, where “Lake Como Air” is now on sale.
“Lake Como Secret Formula”
Declared to be “100% AUTHENTIC AIR FROM LAKE COMO, TRAPPED IN A CAN THE PERFECT AND LUXURIOUS SOUVENIR”, the 400 ml of air come in a deep blue tin depicting a boat surrounded by a sinuous white wake. “Take a piece of Lake Como with you, a luxurious souvenir, perfect for those who wish to rediscover the peace and elegance of this heavenly corner, sealed in a tin. Open it whenever you need a moment of escape, tranquility, or simply beauty,” the brand’s website suggests.
For almost €10 buyers get a can of air that is mostly nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%), the product information reveals, alongside small quantities of argon, carbon dioxide, neon, helium, methane, krypton, hydrogen, and xenon, plus a minuscule 0.0000001% of “Lake Como Secret Formula”.
Rampant consumerism or fun entrepreneurial spirit?
“We thought of encapsulating the lake air in a jar that can then be taken anywhere in the world,” Daniele Abagnale of the agency behind the product told Italian daily La Repubblica, insisting, for those concerned about wasting resources: “The jar, once opened, becomes a pen holder or a vase and is completely recyclable.”
Though some might say the Lake Como Air is a symptom of modern consumerism, the product is arguably the inheritor of a proud Italian tradition of innovation and expediency known as “cazzimma”, which roughly translates to a “dog-eat-dog” attitude. It was an Italian called Gennaro Ciaravolo who, in war-ravaged Naples, created “Aria di Napoli”, by filling empty US ration cans with air and selling it back to the WWII troops.
Art and anti-pollution
Artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, with his “Air de Paris”, Andy Warhol with “Campbell’s Soup Cans”, and Damien Hirst with “Pharmacy” have explored the idea of “containers of emptiness” in conceptual art over the decades. And towards the year 2000, cans of 20th century air were being sold as ironic mementos of a whole epoch.
If all that makes you gasp, take a deep breath because some destinations known for the great outdoors and invigorating environs, from the Swiss Alps to the Canadian Rockies, have gone a step further than mere tourist novelties. Since the early 2010s, they have been selling their mountain breezes in spray bottles that provide 160 lungfuls of fresh air to people who live in some of the most polluted areas of China and India. And in 2016, UK air quality company, Aethaer, began selling air from five of the country’s Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty to oxygenate the national conversation about air pollution.
