Italy Grand Tour: Small fire in Bisceglie

This article is published in number 23 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 8, 2021

I have no doubt.
If bookstores didn’t exist, my life would have been different.
As a reader, because I am the daughter of people who trust numbers more than words and I owe everything to the bookshop in the neighborhood where I grew up, south of Rome, the glorious New Europe, and to the patience of the Pieralice sisters who helped me choose books I didn’t know about, but needed.
And as a writer, because since I published my first novel twenty-three years ago, traveling around Italy, from bookstore to bookstore, and meeting readers, has given me the feeling that the imaginary friends with whom I entertained as a child existed. really, now I had them in front of us.

How those imaginary friends asked themselves the same questions as me and struggled to find answers like me; it matters little who writes a story and who reads it, the important thing is to sit around the same fire.

So San Donà, Bassano, Velletri, for me they are no longer San Donà, Bassano, Velletri … Thanks to their bookcases, they represent the possibility of a fire being lit..
But now? What will become of the possibility of those fires? I ask Viviana Peloso, eyes as clear as freshly washed windows and a smile that cancels defenses and distances. We are in Bisceglie, where Viviana is the restless and luminous soul of one of the bookstores that I have missed most, in this long year and a half, the Vecchie Segherie Mastrototaro. It is called this way because it was born thanks to the blow of heart of the entrepreneur Mauro Mastrototaro, owner of the incredible building that houses the library, between the Norman-Swabian castle and the port, in the bastion of San Gennaro, and which before transforming it was a sawmill where packaging was produced. A place equal only to itself that could only be entrusted to Viviana, also equal only to herself. One who, while studying Business Economics, worked in an independent bookshop in Adria where she discovered that what she did concerned her much more than what she studied. One who, when that bookstore was forced to close, started working as a secretary in an eye clinic, but by now the apple had been bitten.

«I was taking vacation and going to the Turin Book Fair. I answered the phone to the patients and in the meantime I queued to listen to Pennac… ». Until, five years ago, Viviana’s energy met the Old Sawmills wager.
“I love my job because it allows me to stay connected with what I am most passionate about, books and people, and to understand where the world is going based on what people read and what they say. The bookshop is a cultural center before being a commercial activity ». So Viviana begins to organize meetings with the authors who light fires also so that the children are the ones to sit around a story. Until the spring of the Duemilaventi arrives, even for the Old Sawmills. “At first, of course, I was afraid that the bookshop could be overwhelmed by the tsunami that hit us. But when I got the first message from a reader asking us what we advised him to read, now that he had all that time available, I had the feeling of having a role that, if played well, would have created even more ties. intense. I began to spend my days on the computer to give advice, to forward orders to send packages, to discuss with colleagues, to observe what was happening on the web to look for ideas. I was really happy when Franceschini declared the book a basic necessity and had the bookshops reopened very soon ».
And if you can’t get out of the tunnel of anguish, the Old Sawmills have tried to furnish it.

«In December, in streaming, I interviewed fourteen great writers, from Nicola Lagioia to Massimo Gramellini, asking each to recommend and tell about five books to suggest their Christmas purchases to readers. Salute! Was born in February, a series of meetings with Ilaria Capua, Mario Tozzi, Daniele Mencarelli and many other figures who can take us by the hand and guide us so that this crisis also becomes an opportunity. Then, again from February, there is Case di carta, a review to reflect and discuss the theme of the house, the absolute protagonist of our lives in recent months. We want to celebrate the publishing houses that have welcomed new stories, have cultivated and nourished them and then have given birth to them, despite everything, and the houses of the authors, sometimes scenery and sometimes real characters of memorable lines ».
So will we be able to continue sitting around a fire just by staying each in his house of paper? No. Because, with the utmost attention to all security protocols, on 11 June the five of the Strega prize this year chose the Vecchie Segherie as the stage for its first public releaseto. And because even the title of the dialogues dedicated to the care of the environment that will be held in the presence on 30, 31 July and 1 August, promises fire: 42 degrees, ideas that burn.

“Forty-two are the degrees that we can reach in summer, 42 are the steps of the staircase that flanks the library, 42 are symbolically the degrees of fever of an Earth that risks becoming inhospitable for a species like ours that mistreats it “. Is responding to the crisis with such enthusiasm the most concrete of dreams? Viviana has no doubts. «Reading can heal a life, because it allows each of us to find its complexity authorized and to think of another world within this, as Paul Éluard said. But even if we take the data in hand, at the end of 2020, ours were better than those of the previous year. We worked fewer hours with the public but we had more time available for the design and care of the library. Undoubtedly the funds for libraries have helped our coffers, but above all they have allowed the comparison between booksellers and librarians, between booksellers and publishers. I’d like it if this exchange became a habit ».
And I’d like it if we all let ourselves be inspired by you, Viviana.

Photo by Stefano Schirato

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