This article is published in number 23 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 8, 2021
In the center of Italy there is a region. Inside, a province. Its capital, a city. In the center of that city, an ancient palace. In the heart of the building, a library. The region is called Marche, the city is Ascoli Piceno, the Renaissance bookshop. A few steps from there, one of the most beautiful squares in the world: Piazza del Popolo. But also the square in front of the bookshop is very elegant, with the light-colored church, the noble facades, the palm trees, the dairy that makes memorable yoghurt and Maritozzi.
Bar with tables outside, boutiques, historic shops. And then yet another square, Piazza Arringo and, in summer, the buildings covered with the Quintana. Gardens, courtyards, loggias. A historic center of a city in Central Italy: a jewel.
Giorgio Pignotti is right when, retracing his history as a bookseller after receiving the Mauri award, he talks about places in the province «which contribute to enriching social relations, thus playing a fundamental role in improving the quality of life of the people». This is certainly his rebirth: a large and well-stocked, bright bookshop with a cafeteria, with a prestigious room for presentations and a publishing house upstairs, a colorful and lively children’s area. Large vaulted ceilings, corridors, books arranged on the walls, on tables, around the mighty ancient stone columns. It is truly a place that functions as a cultural center in a somewhat closed city, a somewhat unknown region, a somewhat peripheral province. It resists and year after year it sows ideas at the service of citizens. For decades. It was 1976, in fact, when, returning from Bologna where he had gone to study, Pignotti founded his library together with
other boys. I can imagine her dream: as a student in Bologna, I too, years later and arriving from the same province, was amazed by the amount of bookstores of all kinds that were there at the time. Antiques, university, technical, second-hand, generalist, “independent”.
Of all sizes and for all tastes. Those were years of turmoil, then the hard times would come for books and so many shutters down, alas, even in large and traditionally strong cities. But Rebirth, perhaps also protected by its happy name, certainly well managed, did not suffer for long. On the contrary, it reinvented itself precisely in the years of the first crisis in the sector and has grown up ever since. He revised his model by organizing a computerized management system (Pignotti was the first to create one in Italy, it’s called MacBOOK and it’s one of the
most used today). It hosts meetings, initiatives, projects for the promotion of reading. Last in chronological order for Giorgio Pignotti, a children’s library within the bookstore: a place that lends books within a place that sells them.
An exciting formula, a bet. Another tool to grow, all together. And meet. Small and large. Readers, citizens.
Visionaries – Giorgio Pignotti, founder, in 1976, of the Rinascita bookshop and winner, in 2020, of the Luciano Prize
and Silvana Mauri.
photo STEFANO SCHIRATO
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