The Europe Challenge

You know how things go. That is, you don’t know—it’s impossible to foresee the consequences of what you’re doing. And all in all, it’s for the best.

‘On Monday, 28 January 2013, from 5pm to 8 p.m. at 28, Via Colautti in Rome, in the heart of Monteverde, Plautilla opens, Italy’s first free bibliolibrary, a space where residents of the neighbourhood and indeed the entire city can freely give, receive or exchange used books.’

There are some photographs from that day: the crowded room, the smiling faces, the bottles, glasses, pizzas, cakes on the large central table, and all around the shelves full of books. Every now and then, more than 10 years later, I look at them and think back to the chain of events that led to the realisation of our venture, perhaps really, as we stated in our leaflets, the first free bibliolibrary in Italy, certainly the only one (even now, as far as I know, but I would be glad if that were not the case) located inside a mental health day centre, and open to everyone. In the promotional leaflets we had written: ‘Plautilla offers a reading and conversation space that aims to transform access to books into a moment of relationship for the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, and beyond.’ A bit pretentious, perhaps, but that was and remains the idea. More importantly, what’s the harm in having pretensions on such matters?

Spring 2007. It is a stressful period, between work and the anxieties of teenage children. Every morning I take my dog Lilli to Villa Sciarra, a park in Monteverde Vecchio, the neighbourhood where I live in Rome. In Italian, Monteverde literally means Green Hill, but in fact unconstrained post-war urban development meant that the image the name evokes does not always coincide with reality. Still, what Monteverde does have is access to two parks, former estates or villas of aristocratic Roman families. One is Villa Pamphili, the largest park in the Italian capital. The other is Villa Sciarra, much smaller and which I like best perhaps exactly because there it is easier to find a quiet snug corner. It is only five minutes away from the Roman streets, but it seems I have walked out of the city into a private garden. I usually walk there alone, thinking about what I will do in the next few hours, but one day I stop to talk to a woman who, like me, is taking her dog to the park. We do not yet know that we will become friends, of that form of friendship that is rarely found in adulthood, and for that reason is even more precious. Almost immediately, however, we discover that we have interests in common, that books occupy an important place in our lives. Morning after morning we get to know each other better, and soon a third ‘dog and reading companion’ joins us. We talk and walk and walk and talk. We complain because the only bookstore in the neighbourhood is about to shut down, while there are no libraries close by in the area. Soon there will be elections: the climate is tense, heavy. Public spaces are described as dangerous because ‘there are people from outside’. And the three of us tell each other that something has to be done, something with books.

I know, it’s absurd even a bit mad or eccentric, you name it, and yet we were thinking and talking like this back then. And perhaps even more absurd, we thought and said it with such force that then we did something about it, we acted on it. In October 2008 the Monteverdelegge reading group was born. Our first meeting place was a station lobby, and the first chosen theme ‘the other’. To let the world, or at least the neighbourhood, know that we exist, we print a few flyers and stick them on the walls (you shouldn’t, but we do it anyway) in Monteverde. At the initial meeting about 30 people, mostly out of curiosity, show up, at the second some more, because eight or 10 people who attend the local mental service day centre have turned up. ‘Can we come, too?’, they asked, and surely we didn’t say no. That will be our (Monteverdelegge’s) good luck, because when—very soon—we are sent away from the station, we will have a roof over our heads.

It’s early 2009, and now the reading group meetings are held inside a room usually used for exhibitions by those who use the day care centre. We have a real crowd before us each time: there has been word of mouth in the neighbourhood and many people come to see what happens once a month in this place where people usually go when they are going through a complicated time in their lives. A time that does not seem to have the word end attached to it and for some of them truly never has. If we had a crystal ball, we would know that this is the embryo of Plautilla. But we don’t have a crystal ball, and we still have a lot of challenging moments to go through. I, in particular, am learning how to moderate a reading group—I have never done it before, but I am finding that I enjoy it and especially that reading is something that can be shared. Every time some new participant comes in, I tell them about an episode that came to mind during one of the first reading group meetings. Many years ago, when I had recently arrived in Rome, friends came to visit me from my own city and I took them to the historical centre in Trastevere, to an area that even now is quieter, not too overrun with tourists. One street in particular, Via della Luce, has retained something of the spirit of the old working-class neighbourhood: there are artisans and a bakery that spreads its scent of cookies fresh out of the oven. But one of my friends, who has always worked at the telephone company, looks up and frowns and says a phrase that baffles me: Bad phone lines! Who would have thought it, I could have passed by ten thousand times on Via della Luce and never noticed the precariously intertwined cables above the small street and on the facades of houses. Similarly, I now say to the participants in the reading group that each of us reads a book by filtering it through our own experiences. The words are the same, but the weight of each one varies according to the eyes looking at them. And the beauty of the conversation in the group is that each person brings their own book, the one that he or she has really known and that is different from all the others. Here there are no experts, the learned and the ignorant; learning, because here at Monteverdelegge everyone is talking about something that others don’t yet know, and the book in this way multiplies and takes on an unimaginable degree of nuance. This I learned then, and it is a lesson that will stay with me forever.

Autumn 2012. A friend, another one (because this is also a story of friendship), tells me that in Madrid someone has opened a ‘free bib-library’, a place where they collect books that people can no longer keep at home and that now find new life, as they are given on loan or as gifts to those who cannot afford to buy them new. Why don’t you do it too? My friend’s idea is beautiful, we like it very much. In recent years Monteverdelegge has grown, we have launched ever more ambitious projects, such as when we proposed to the local residents to read a novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ragazzi di vita (Boys Alive), whose first chapters are set right here, in these streets and squares. Pasolini’s novel deals, among other things, with the impact of frenetic industrial modernisation on the sleepy suburbs Monteverde once was. Is that time of adjustment really behind us, are we really settled now? Around this project many other ideas have come up: walks on the places mentioned in the novel, meetings in schools, and even a reading marathon in the beautiful theatre in the centre of the neighbourhood, in which people from all over the city participated. But how are we going to do it this time? Where can we find a space to accommodate so many books?

In a flash, the problem is solved: the manager of the day care centre takes us to a large room full of old computers and ugly metal shelves and tells us that if we want to, we can use it for our future free bookstore. And after this miracle, there is immediately another one: the granddaughter of a great Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg, is moving house and has to give away several thousand books that have no place in her future home. Without hesitation she decides to give us all these books, and following her example so many more come along.

When I think back to that time before the opening, it’s a bit like when you hit the ‘fast-forward’ button. We are always running to get our new space set up as best as we can, knowing among other things that it will also house the day centre workshops. We want it to be as cosy as possible, with a large table in the middle around which we can sit and talk about our readings, a comfortable couch for those who prefer to spend a few hours reading in silence, plants, and warm lights. We have little money but everyone in the neighbourhood is contributing to help us out: those who donate shelving, chairs or furnishings, and those who donate their most precious asset, their time.

Lacking a name, proposals overlap, and in the end we decide to dedicate our library to a 17th-century Italian artist, Plautilla Bricci, who also worked in Monteverde, and whose name, like that of so many women artists, has been swallowed up by history. (A few years later, in 2019, writer Melania Mazzucco dedicated a novel to her, L’architettrice.)

28 January 2013, the inauguration. It’s a party, really. There are no official speeches, we mostly think and talk about what we are going to do. As I said, we don’t have a crystal ball, but we’re sure that Plautilla will become a landmark for the neighbourhood. And that is exactly what happens; we will have the reading groups and workshops (of poetry and translation and for a while also of bookbinding) and loads of initiatives. So many that mentioning them all is impossible: Self-portrait of the publisher, Poetry Factory, I’ll tell you about a book… The Covid pandemic will also come, and for almost two years our bibliolibrary was closed, but we will have the virtual Plautilla and although it will not be the same, we will be content. Health comes first, they say. Mental health through a book is a close second.

Spring 2024. Here we are again, the big table is still in place, meetings have resumed, books are being reordered. Once again, we don’t know what the future holds. And after all, isn’t it better that way?

_________________________________________________________________________________________

About the Author

Credit: Dino Ignani

Maria Teresa Carbone (b. 1954), journalist, author and translator, works mainly on cultural issues with a focus on publishing and teaches courses in journalism (University of California Education Abroad Program, Università Roma Tre). Her most recent books are Che ci faccio qui? Scrittrici e scrittori nell’era della postfotografia (Italo Svevo 2022) and the poetry collection Calendiario (Aragno 2020).