GIORGIO BELLEDI

“I was a bookseller from 1946 to 2002.
Now I’m 83 years old,
am I old enough to talk about it?”.
(We both laugh.)

“My whole life I’ve had two jobs” he says. “This house belongs to a family of painters”. (The walls are covered with paintings, made by Belledi, by his late wife, by his father-in-law.)
“I worked as a bookseller to earn a living, it was my main job.” (He starts telling his story and in a few sentences he explains his past, present and future.)
 “My father owned a small bookshop which lasted 25 years, small but with a cultivated clientele”. It went so far as to give birth to a magazine, La Palatina, secretly financed by Barilla  –  “now that he’s dead, we can say it” – and edited by Attilio Bertolucci (poet and father of the two filmakers) that published texts by authors such as Pasolini, Gadda, Tassi, Artoni.
“The magazine circulated all around Italy and did not contain any advertising. It lasted six years”.
“Our bookshop was small, it hardly survived, but it provided a living both to my family and to the family of my father”.
“Then came Feltrinelli, Mr. Montroni asked me to become the director of the new bookshop and I accepted. I sold my bookshop – my father was old by then – and maintained my clientele”.
“I learnt the ‘Feltrinelli’s way’. In my bookshop, we had never made an inventory.”
“Customers used to spend half-days chatting in my bookshop, while we were working. It was a small bookshop. When I started working at Feltrinelli, it was a big bookshop, where many people entered, but I have always kept this space for the customers.”
“Now the relationship between clerks and customers has changed a lot.” “A bookshop clerk was once highly respected and admired.” “Those systems that contributed to a clerk’s training don’t exist anymore.” “There is a lack of booksellers. People try to sell books as if they were ordinary goods.” “Then came the computers, but old index cards were more useful for training a bookseller. They took more time, but they also forced the clerks to get to know each book, step by step. For each new arrival, the clerk had to fill in the cards with the relevant data: author, title, publisher, date of arrival. The card was then collected at the counter when the book was sold.” (Do you remember those cards? I do and I had never understood what they were for before.)
“A computer does the same things, and more quickly, but it’s used by a single person whereas cards were handled by all the clerks, who had to know each different section and each different book of the bookshop.” “Clerks and booksellers were trained by the bookshop itself, year after year”.  “There were many more titles before, but with the new managing techniques all those titles that don’t sell quickly have been discarded”.  
“However I think that in a cultural bookshop you should find some must have books even if they don’t sell much.”
“Little by little, but especially after the year 2000, things have started to change. The cultural identity of the bookshop was still important at that time, but then profits, costs and the like became more important… ”. “I don’t deny this new management the right to renew bookshops, but I wouldn’t have closed the most famous and profitable ones. I would have kept them in order to preserve Feltrinelli’s image.” “The idea of cultural bookselling is lost.”

(What about the crisis?)
“During the Fifties and the Sixties, the Italian economic miracle, books weren’t sold anymore. Other goods were favoured by the miracle.”
“Despite a greater circulation of money, book sales do not automatically rise.”

(What about painting?)
 “When I was 18, a friend of mine and I started to visit the first biennals of the post-war period. It was around 1945/1946. We used to go to exhibitions and then we used to paint. But, little by little, a culture of art gained ground and gave birth to a new form of professionalism.” “My father shared my passion for painting, therefore each day from eleven to three I stayed away from the bookshop and painted.” “But I abstained from painting for many years, afterwards.”

(I decided to quote his sentences exactly as I have heard them.
I arrived in Parma on a sunny morning at the beginning of autumn. By train. I walked through the bridge and turned left into a small street flanked by old houses facing the Taro river.
I rang the doorbell. I said my name. I got in.
The apartment immediately reveals who lives there, in all respects. Smiling and hospitable, like him. Polite and cultivated, like him… but I’ll have to wait a few minutes to discover it.
The walls are covered with paintings. Not the usual landscapes, but thoughts and reflections. He invites me to sit in the most comfortable armchair, the one he’s chosen for listening to music and audiobooks. He asks me what I wish to know… I don’t want to know anything in particular. I love to listen to people, to sit in a comfortable armchair and listen to the stories told by people who have lived a lot of life and can teach me their version of things. “I was a bookseller from 1946 to 2002. Now I’m 83 years old, am I old enough to talk about it?”. We both laugh.
A special man, who has loved both his life and his work, and his family.
He gave me the catalogues of his exhibitions as a present.
This reminded me of when I was a little girl and used to sit on Mrs. Armanda’s swing seat while she told me the story of her life. In a few, wise sentences, full of a story that I couldn’t see but that she painted before my eyes, presenting me with a memory that has helped me to grow up. And now I would like to present you with a memory that would be a shame to lose.)