Ernesto Ferrero’s pantry. His album of writers is the jam of the twentieth century

Handling money was an offense and driving a car a disgrace. Giulio Einaudi and Italo Calvino were bad drivers and Einaudi, the “Napoleon” of the publishing house, the founder, was a huge miser. Only Mario Soldati managed to deceive him, with intelligence (one who “always had his hands empty and two mortgages to pay”). One day, in Turin, together with Nico Orengo, they entered a clothing store. Einaudi tried on a “soft cashmere jacket” and Soldati a “sheepskin”. Einaudi’s mistake was to say: “But it looks great on her!”, Soldati’s ability to reply: “Thank you, I consider it a tribute!”. It was Orengo who took out the checkbook. There were also those, like Bobi Bazlen, who would have preferred to spend their whole life, in their small house in Rome, in via Margutta, simply wearing a single sweater, the “Norwegian and brown one”. Only that and his books. The literature is full of restlessness. Eugenio Montale would have liked to smoke his Muratti and disappear as smoke disappears. He had written many of his poems on envelopes, tram tickets and packets of cigarettes. In the Milan telephone directory, he was listed as a “journalist”. Friends didn’t know what to call him: “Professor, master?”. He who was the poet, Nobel, avoided in every way to talk about difficult things. When someone tried, usually in a restaurant, Montale would interrupt him and say: “But try some of these small onions and these pickles”. Ernesto Ferrero has tasted them all, indeed, he has “tested” them and in fact has written memories, books and even obituaries on all of them. He started in 1963. Since then, tins of publishers, writers, literary agents have ended up in his pantry. In his Family album, “Masters of the twentieth century portrayed live (Einaudi) he catalogs them like jams.

There are “the favourites” (Calvino and Levi) the “chief tribes” (Einaudi, Bollati, Garzanti, Enzo and Elvira Sellerio ..) the “magicians and tightrope walkers” (Munari and Ceronetti …) and still the “restless” (Parise, Sciascia) or “the class mates” (Cerati and Orengo). Some have a sour, runny taste, such as plum jams. Garzanti was, for example, the terrible. He had had an Oedipus childhood. His father was about to disinherit him. He worked in a small room, in Milan, halfway between via Senato and via della Spiga, and cursed, in equal measure, administrators, writers, undersecretaries of state, poets and competing publishers. He repeated: “If I find someone who sets fire to the publishing house, I’ll give him ten million”. It was of course false. Di Sciascia, whom he had commissioned to write the Pirandello entry for his lui Garzantine, even managed to say: “he may be a great writer, but as an editor he is a dog”. Ferrero is as if he had been commissioned, by all of them, to cultivate, plow through their old foibles, anxieties, smiles. The memory, the memories, in this text of yours are countryside and hills, mountains. In Dogliani, Franco Lucentini in fact gave driving lessons (to no avail) to Giulio Einaudi (they always ended up on the lawns). Erich Linder, the literary agent, the father of all writers, slightly deranged creatures, thanks to a story about the Valtellina (commissioned by a bank) manages to get Soldati a hundred million in compensation. Even in Ferrero’s remorse there is the countryside. He reveals that he regrets not having visited Sciascia, in the Noce district. He also lacks the taste of “prickly pear”, that of via Siracusa, in Palermo, headquarters of the Sellerio publishing house, because making books in Palermo, noted Sciascia, is “like cultivating prickly pears in Milan”.

In those rooms, Sciascia invents the necklace “Memoria” and the phrase of European grace, of divine modesty. Every time he proposed an illustration for a book he anticipated it with: “It’s worth it, of course, as a timid suggestion”. From Inge Feltrinelli, Ferrero, on the other hand, returns the strawberry flavor, the joy, and even the disappointments. Unlike her husband Giangiacomo, she had to understand that communism was reduced to the banal anecdote about Fidel Castro: “He kept the chickens on the terrace and next to the basket to play basketball”. High up, on the inaccessible shelf, still rests the Goffredo Parise jar, “always on the run, in agitation”. Giosetta Fioroni, who loved him for twenty-five years, had also forgiven him for running away from him who was “overbearing”, “selfish”, “capricious”. Her house, on the banks of the Piave, he had furnished with a tavern table. She boasted, also to Ferrero, of knowing restaurants. It was only a revenge for Parise, a poor boy, a restless, yes, who accumulated women, smells, melancholy. He was reckless and reckless. He lived and went like this: “Playing with life very stupidly.”

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• Carmelo Caruso

• Carmelo Caruso, journalist in Palermo, Milan, Rome. He started at La Repubblica. Today he works at the Foglio