This article is published in issue 18 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 3, 2022
Romano, I would like to open a bookshop in my country ».
“Well, how many inhabitants does it make?”
“180”.
«Well, 180 thousand divided …».
“Not 180 thousand, 180”.
“You are crazy”.
This conversation between the author of The library on the hill (Einaudi) Alba Donati and Romano Montroni, legendary director of libraries, really happened and Alba Donati put it in exergue from her book.
Alba Donati is an internationally renowned Tuscan poetess who two years ago decided to open a bookshop in the tiny town of which she comes from, which is called Lucignana and is a fraction of the municipality of Coreglia Antelminelli in the province of Lucca, «surrounded by mountains covered by holm oak woods and with a spectacular view of the Apennine and Apuan peaks».
I have only seen this bookcase drawn on the cover of the book and it is a small wooden garden with a garden that looks like it came out of an English storybook. I learned that a month after it was built it burned down and they rebuilt it from scratch, like in a fairytale.
How did a poet come up with the idea of opening a bookstore in a tiny town while small, independent companies are closing down all over the world? Not for nothing is she a poet. «Things don’t come to mind», she writes on the first page of this strange bookish diary, «things brood, rise, clutter our imagination while we sleep. Things have their own legs, they make a parallel journey in an area of us that we do not even remotely know where it is and at a certain point they knock: here we are, we are your ideas ready to be heard ».
It works exactly like this. I subscribe. It’s called inspiration and it’s that thing that underlies every creative project that the crazier and reckless the more in this reckless and insane world he is likely to succeed. Alba Donati followed the inspiration, opened her library and told a crazy love story for books and their authors mixed with that of her life and her family. A story that ten European publishers have already bought.
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Source: Vanity Fair
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