Ferrara, 21 June 2024 – It is advertising. On the white sheet, the characters are a little oblique like those left by a fountain pen, we read: “Great assortment”. Then a list, there are the stationery items, mass books in any binding, music paper. Again, seeds and leaves for artificial flowers. Ink, of all kinds, we specify. In bottles and kegs. 1881-2024, a parenthesis opens and closes, a blow of the ax on what until the other day was a beautiful fairy tale, now only tears that I struggle to hold back Giorgio Voghenzi77 years old, and the wife Anita Stocchetti who prefers not to say her age, because she is a woman and because she suddenly feels all those years, the thought that in a few days she will give the last turn of the key to a world, three generations, children who go out clutching their diary, colored glitter that a customer struggles to choose. “But do you need glue?”, he persists in asking. Giorgio and Anita hand in hand for a life behind the counter Social stationery. It closes in September. “There’s nothing left to do,” he says, his eyes shining. “It’s inevitable”, adds his wife who still doesn’t believe it. The crisis, changing tastes because notebooks and pencils are now bought in bulk on a laminated shelf in the shopping centre, frozen tunnels in puffs of fake air, purchases conditioned by the latest advertisement featuring a model whose name no one remembers anymore. “The takings? Two or three euros a day, sometimes not even a penny. In a whole day no one comes in, no one anymore”, says Anita, heir to a dynasty that has followed one another behind the house, the chrome keys, a ‘another date engraved, 1889. It looks like that of a saloon.
Giorgio Voghenzi, 77 years old, shows an ancient advertising billboard
The first of his family it was his grandfather who entered the market of pencil cases and discounted books. His name was Antonio Stocchetti, it was 1927. Then his father arrived, smiles in the green enamelled shop window, jacket and tie, A pride. “He continued to work here until the age of 87, the scent of paper was life for him”, he recalls. No one comes in through that door anymore. “In some periods we struggled to pay 800 euros in rentthen we caught up”, but it wasn’t enough. They received the eviction, the date is September. The month of schools, the ringing of the bell, students leafing through blank pages of a notebook, thinking that they will write nice things in it things. Giorgio and Anita won’t be there, their smiles only for their niece. “How sorry we are.”
