Now, I love my wife, who is a wonderful, calm woman, who never asks where I’m going or why, even if I come home after ten at night. I know wives of others, meddling, capricious, tiresome, always ready to criticize, ask questions and so on. Not Viola: especially when she’s pregnant, she thinks about the children, about what’s to come, about the house and that’s it. That’s precisely the situation now she’s expecting the fourth, and I have a vague suspicion that this time she did it on purpose – she took out the diaphragm.

On the other hand, what am I to do? Honestly, I think I’m a worker. The antiquarian bookshop is my father’s and, no doubt about it, he’s the one who built it up. From his father, my grandfather, he inherited little more than a stall in Piazzale Nord. My grandfather – it’s not a figure of speech – arrived from Pontremoli with a basket of used books. For years he lived on chick-pea pancakes and drank water from the fountain, and he gradually put down roots in the metropolis, which was just then starting to expand. He and my father deserve credit, agreed, but you have to acknowledge that without what I contributed to the business myself we wouldn’t be the best-known antiquarian bookshop in Lombardy today.

All the Milanese collectors seek us out, who are more numerous than you might think, and people write from all over Italy. Modesty aside, I was the one who taught my father that a nose for the business isn’t enough, that it takes a minimal cultural framework as well: ranging from the plain old Piedmontese editions of Bona, and the versatile little volumes of Le Monnier, with their pink covers, all the way up to truly rare pieces. I have about a dozen books from the sixteenth century, sixty Aldine books, a good thirty-seven of which have the original dolphin-and-anchor printer’s mark. I have Abramo Hortel’s Imago Mundi, a marvellous atlas from the late sixteenth century. My father wanted to take it apart and sell the maps individually. In fact, five or six years ago it was very fashionable to have, as decor, old maps put into frames. I was against it, and I was right. Today I’ve been offered upward of four hundred thousand lire for that Imago mundi, but even now I can’t make up my mind to sell it, because every now and then I like to sit and look through it.

In the morning I always get up at seven, and an hour later I’m in the shop, before my four salespeople, before the woman who does the accounts. My father sometimes comes by and sometimes he doesn’t, and I can’t blame him: he’s seventy, and deserves a break. But, for his part, he should also recognize that I keep the business going and, if nothing else, add an ‘& Son’ to the business name. He has me on a salary – a good one, moreover – but he doesn’t give me any share in the profits. I leave at six every night, except on Tuesdays and Fridays, when I know that the important customers come by, the ones you have to tend to personally. So it’s not at all an easy life, even though I don’t lack comforts that my grandfather certainly didn’t have: a car, a nice house, two weeks of vacation a year, a seasonal outing to the Frankfurt Book Fair, for business but also pleasure.