Stefano Scanu tells me that there is a gradient of literacy in Italy. Starting in Milan and going south, people read less and less. A nexus of factors resulted in the pattern, he tells me. The first factor is wealth, for the opulent families in the north have more time to devote to books, to art, to poetry, to music. As the financial stress increases as one travels south to Florence, then Rome then Sicily, so do one’s daily responsibilities. “When you are poor, the last of your interests… is to read a book, because you have to clean up everything, or pay your bills.” Besides, Stefanu says, what little time they do have is spent enjoying the sun and the sea, “and not stay at home with a rainy day outside and read a book.”
“This is not my opinion,” he adds, “this is a kind of a theory.”
“And bookshops close, day by day, year by year, and it’s a big, huge problem for our country. It’s like movie theaters. Movie theaters close every year, every year, because people stay at home watching Netflix and don’t go to the movie theater. And bookshops have the same destiny.”
But now, bookshops all across the North, in Turin and Milan, especially, are in “really, really bad moments.” But in Rome, one of the least literate cities in Europe (at least now), bookshops are the only businesses in the city to be open. According to the governing body of Rome, “books are like bread. And this was a really, really, really dangerous thing to say.”
***
Stefano is the vice president of Libraccio, a chain of second hand bookstores “which in Italian means ‘Bad Book.’ This is hilarious,” he says with a chuckle. “It’s a kind of Strand — an Italian Strand,” he explains in an attempt to extend the comparison to America. Strand is the multi-story independent bookstore in Manhattan with the slogan “18 miles of books.” It was a landmark in Manhattan long before it was officially designated so by the city of New York. Any avid reader living in New York knows about Strand,” my mom added later.
Libraccio was founded forty years ago and now there are “so many bookshops around Italy,” Stefano boasted. The shops are scattered in a flower-shape across the peninsula. Fourteen stores make a rough circle in northern Italy, seven of which are in Milan alone. And then the thin stem: one shop in the capital city of Calabria, at the peninsula’s southern point, and one in the center of Rome.
Stefano’s bookshop is in the center of Rome, an area of the city Stefano compares to the borough of Manhattan. It’s surrounded by offices and “charming restaurants” and museums. The Roman equivalent of Grand Central Station is only a few blocks away. Nobody lives in the area, Stefano says, so the customers are not neighborhood customers. His clientele, he adds, is the exact opposite of Chiara’s bohemian art community. Instead, his customers are primarily tourists and Romans alike who “passed through the bookshop maybe once in their life.”
It’s unsurprising that a passerby may find themselves wandering into the store. Libraccio is housed in a grand 18th century building, so grand that tourists often stop to take selfies in front of the store. The inside is even more impressive: three stories of corinthian columns, vaulted ceilings, and tens of thousands of books. One floor is dedicated entirely to secondhand books, the next to new imports, and finally, one story is reserved for DVD’s, CD’s vinyls, and records.
***
When the government announced in early May that bookshops would be the first businesses in Rome to open, Stefano was shocked. The government was never particularly interested in bookshops. They’ve existed in a mutualistic relationship for decades — the government doesn’t expect to give them money, and they expect the same from the government. Stefano decided it must have been a symbolic act, one to attain political favor from its citizens. “The government right now is in a bit of a crisis,” Stefano said, “and they opened bookshops to say, ‘I’m smart. I think that reading art, literature and poetry in this time is like food for us because we don’t have anything”
“It’s a symbolic act,” he added. “They really don’t care anything about bookshops.”
Stefano’s team of 23 works in shifts, with five employees in the shop at a time. At 10am on May 5th, Stefano and his coworkers stood in their empty shop, waiting for a customer. After an hour, a few people began to wander in, not with inquiries about books to buy but with questions about how a bookstore could possibly be open before anyone else. Now, a lot of the people come to the bookshop just to waste time. “You can’t go to the club, you can’t go to the restaurant, you can’t go to the gym, but you can go to the bookshop.”
As more and more people wandered into the shop, Stefano noticed a common interest. Everyone wants books about the virus, Stefano says, about “The Problem.” “The kind of books we have in our shop… they talk about another era… and we have this huge place full of books, but the books inside are not useful for this moment.” There are a few authors in the shop who have written novels about pandemia, like José Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Stephen King, and all of those shelves have cleared.
“I’m kind of surprised,” I say. “With limited things to do, wouldn’t you want an escape? And this is the perfect time to sit down and read a book that takes you out of this moment.”
He says that a few people “are really, really convinced by the purpose of buying books. They come in and buy stacks and stacks of books, many of which include the complete Twilight saga.
Perhaps a reason everyone wants to read science fiction, he muses, is because of the space man. “We have this guy who come in two time a day to the bookshop, and they spent something like two hours to do that because the bookshop is huge, and when people, when customers see him, because he has this kind of costume with a mask, and gloves — HUGE gloves — and this kind of tube that sprays I don’t know what, it’s like a scientific movie, it’s a man from the moon that comes in two times a day to wash everything. It’s weird.”
I ask if most people are conscious of safety measures, like the spaceman. He says no — people are uncomfortable with washing their hands and wearing a mask and staying apart. He’s beginning to feel like a policeman, for his dialogue with customers has become little more than “okay you can come in, you can wait, just two minutes more, please, don’t move like this, please don’t touch the book” They posted signs about social distancing around the shop, but he says as if it’s obvious, “Roman people are not really comfortable with the rules…. They don’t read anything. And they stay all together like ships.”
***
During quarantine, Stefano read twelve books. They’ve “been waiting for me for ages,” he says, waving his hand to the color-coordinated bookshelf above his head. He read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, a speculative work about the birth of the Greek tragic poem. He read Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the novella that inspired Blake Edward’s classic film. He read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, “a swash-buckling account that begins with the origin of the species and ends with post-humans,” writes The Guardian. Harai predicts that the end of Homo sapiens will come not through disease, but through the biotechnical revolution: we will be replaced by immortal post-humans, immune to disease and capable of living forever.
“I am a kind-of writer,” he adds, “and I finished my big novel.” It’s about Odysseus and it’s about the invention of paper in seventeenth century England, and it’s about the small particles that people inhaled due to the production of paper. Every day for weeks, Stefano sat at his desk for five hours a day and laid out the roadmap for his novel, until it was finished.
“And it’s actually like a gift for me,” he says, “because I am like never, ever, managed to have this free time all for me, and every day, no distractions, no phone rings, no emails, no everything. So I slowed down, and that was unexpected, and it’s like a gift. I don’t know the words in this language. And I [was never] sad or depressed about that, because it’s like, [I found] something that I, that disappeared in the last years because I did the same job for seventeen years.”
“You are able to live with less now,” he continues. “You are able to live with more free time. You are able to live in the same place where you need, to move less than before and come back to the old life and start to run, from one appointment to another and work like a slave and be, all the time, so nervous, I think it’s a bit shocking for everyone, when everything will be opened like the old times.”
***
I learn later that by ‘kind of a writer,’ he means that he has already published five books at the same time as working as the vice president of the biggest bookshop in Rome. He wrote Come un Albero in un’ampolla, (Like a Tree in a Bottle), a book of poetry about trees and landscapes. “It’s like haunted poetry,” Stefano says. He wrote a guidebook “about places in the world that move.” Take Mont Saint-Michel, a tidal island in France, he says. It’s “a kind of mountain, but it’s an island as well, because the sea comes down, up and down, at different times of day. And you can go by car to the islands but you can’t go out with a car, you need a boat, because after 5pm, the sea goes up.”
Stefano wrote a collection of fifteen biographies of musicians, directors, architects, “that have a weird life,” like “the first monk who jumped from the Tour Eiffel because he invented a kind of parachute… but he died… or the first actress who jumped from the “H” of “Hollywood,” you know, Hollywood sign, the big one? Or Peg Antwhistle, he adds, the failed actress who jumped from the “H” in the Hollywood sign. Finally, he wrote a “kind of guidebook about movie theaters in Rome… I tell the history of Rome, telling the history of these movie theaters.”
At the Sapienza University of Rome, Stefano studied Italian Literature with Professor Benvegnu. Graduating with a major in the humanities is “not good for Italian people,” Stefano adds, “because you can’t find jobs with this kind of education. Just for your passion… if you don’t want to be a teacher, it’s hard with this kind of education.”
“It seems like you found a very fulfilling job, though — two or three!” I reply.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, “it’s not easy… because, as we said before, people don’t buy books … [writing] is hard to do, if you do this, but it’s fun… and it’s a quite good job.”
“People in Italy don’t live with books,” he continued, “so you must be really really famous, because [the publishers] pay not so much for the books. So [writing] is just like an hobby”
***
“So… have you been watching any good Italian movies?” I ask.
Stefano tells me about Ultras, a film about dueling soccer clans, and an Italian movie about the painter, Antonio de Gaboie. He “was a knife painter,” Italian painter, really really wild, it’s quite mad, and he used to paint animals, tigers, lions, but he used to live in a mountain, an Italian mountain. Nothing that he painted was real for me, but it’s like an expression of his soul, his fears, and it’s a nice story. They [made it] a movie just last year, [and I watched it in] the movie theater just before the lockdown. This is a problem for me because I used to go to the movie theater one day a week, and now they are closed, it’s kind of a drama. It’s drama for me.”
“Yeah… I’m definitely sad,” I reply. “I love going to movie theaters. My mom’s a film teacher, so watching movies is very important to us.”
“Oh! Lucky you, lucky you… movie and cinema is my passion,” he adds, “but I don’t work with this. It’s just a passion, just a hobby. But it’s the most important art of my life.”
Now, every Sunday at five, “when people go to the movie theater,” Stefano does a small feature on a local radio station. He began the first week of quarantine.
He seems to look above his computer screen at something that no longer exists, but should. “And I say to the people, if you can move from your couch, just imagine to stay in the movie theater, and I describe the movie theater. I describe the neighborhood, and I describe the movie that I’m going to see…” Nothing was real anymore. Instead, it was an expression of his soul.
