Greta Canalis, 35, is probably the only one Doll doctor still operating in Italy. His “tools” are needle, thread, handles, tabs, straw, glass eyes. Patients, porcelain dolls, teddy bears, barbies, little horses, beautiful fat men. «Our first companions in life». She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, she preferred the restoration of memories to painting and sculpture. An idea put to the ground ten years ago, when you decided to inherit the profession from the «Balocco Arte» laboratory shop, in via Barbaroux 10 H «where I worked alongside my teacher for seven years. She looked like Santa Claus, with the big voice and the long beard, she repaired dolls as a hobby » she says on the phone, while she is packing the last shipments, before leaving for a toy fair in Germany.
«Before intervening, I often need to establish a dialogue with my patients. If a client brings me her doll, before I touch it, I put it on my desk and maybe we look into each other’s eyes from time to time for a week and I understand what to do. With the exception of porcelain or collectible ones, I try to intervene as little as possible on the dolls. For example, it is difficult to insert an eye or an ear if they are missing. At the beginning, by mistake, I restored them almost like new and my clients were disappointed, because after all those years together they struggled to recognize them: they were no longer their friends”.
At «Balocco Arte», where you only receive by appointment, the majority of requests arrive via social media, but then «they take trains, planes, rather than sending their stuffed animals: at all ages. They carry them tossed around in envelopes, they don’t feel like entrusting them to the courier.” There are many medical records to examine. «During Christmas it can be as high as 200 a week. On average, however, there are around fifty, but the estimates are not always accepted.” A full-time doll doctor, also certified by the American «Doll Doctor’s Association», «I am one of the few, if not the only one, to do it in Italy. There is the doll hospital in Naples, which is historic, but I don’t know if only the museum and another laboratory remain in Rome, in via Ripetta, which I found closed the last time.”
