“Half round of velvet”, because no tradition can ever survive without innovation

Upon his death, Ciccitta Lampis leaves her niece Lia and her daughters Ruth, Ester and Noemi in difficult economic conditions. The only possible solution to recover seems to be selling the “number twenty”, a building along the main street of the town of Santa Gisa, a small (and imaginary) center in the south west of Sardinia. A palace owned by the family for generations. However, a problem arises: before dying, Ciccitta signed a lease agreement with a “foreigner”, Giorgio Albert, from Paris, so that he could open a bookshop there. And the man really wants to open the bookstore, despite the fact that very few in the country read and want to welcome a stranger. However, the "number twenty" will become a crossroads of novels and lost traditions that will not only remind the Lampis how much of their history they have put aside, but will blow the wind of change on a community that has forgotten itself.

Declared homage to the characters and atmospheres of "Canne al vento" by Grazia Deledda, "Mezzo giro di corda" (Edizioni Effetto, 2022, pp. 368), represents the literary debut of Mirco Cogotti , born in Carbonia and Parisian d ' adoption A book, by Cogotti, which helps us to understand how nothing can unite a community more than tradition, but no tradition can ever survive without including the new.

We ask the author, then, why, in his opinion, are tradition and memory so important?

“Let me start by saying that for a long time Sardinia represented the past, the windy winters, the long days. When I moved to Paris I was close to thirty and I had decided to stop after years of being a globetrotter. But it was damn hard: I didn't have a steady job, I lived in a closet, I was alone. In the company of Grazia Deledda's books I faced that period and found myself remembering the abandoned villages, the patronal feasts, our timeless mountains, the depopulated villages. Thanks to them I started writing this novel and I found a job that allowed me to stay in Paris. Here, tradition and memory serve this purpose: to make us understand where we want to go ”.

But why does Giorgio Albert really want to move to Santa Gisa?

“I can certainly tell you that Giorgio does what many young people do every day: he moves elsewhere to make a dream come true. It is only surprising that he moved to Sulcis when he could also have opened a bookshop in Paris. But here I would like to say that we think in trivial categories: the dream of opening a bookshop in a big city and that of doing it in a small town do not necessarily correspond. And if we are good enough to put aside the logic of profit we have been educated in, we can also recognize the legitimacy of both. To answer your question, Giorgio Albert is moved by the desire to render a service to the community through books ”.

What does the building at "number twenty" represent in your novel?

“Generally, the first houses you come across upon entering the village are the good ones, they belong to rich and well-respected families. The number twenty should belong to this category, but it has long since been abandoned and is a victim of bad luck. It represents the decadence and oblivion of a past that no longer seems willing to tell anything about itself, playing to some extent the role of Casa Pintor in Canne al vento. Its walls scream redemption and hence the arrival of Giorgio Albert who decides to turn it into a bookshop ".

Why a bookshop when you know that books sell very little?

“The adolescence in Sulcis and above all the years in classical high school taught me that there is nothing more salvific than books: they are company in moments of solitude, protection when we feel fragile, a weapon when we have to defend ourselves. They then give the extraordinary gift of ubiquity allowing us to travel in time and space as we please. Believe me, there is nothing that can redeem an old building or a lost community as much as a bookstore ”.

But can tradition and change really coexist?

I would rather wonder if tradition can really exist without change. Every gesture, every sentence, every ritual in which we find ourselves recognizing ourselves as a community are the sum of many small changes for which a community has found itself passing through and accepting itself. The truth is that very often we misuse the word tradition with the meaning of limit or barrier, the wall that would separate an 'us' from a 'them', when it is rather a common ground, in which to welcome the arrival of the different. And it is on this ground that we should always feel ready to write new traditions, which look to the new while preserving the past. It may seem like a complicated challenge, but in reality this is what communities have been doing for millennia, with all due respect to all ideologies ”.

Could a novel like this ever have been born without his transfer to Paris?

“I have not stopped living in Sardinia even in the years when I thought I had forgotten it. I experience it a little every day, as I walk along the Seine in search of inspiration or lose myself among the masterpieces of the Louvre. However, I cannot deny that this book was also written by that part of me that loves walking around Montmartre on Monday nights, when it rains and there are no tourists on the street. Surely the most Parisian has delivered to history are the references to bookstores. They are all in their own way: from Les mots à la bouche, to Shakespeare & co, to the Monte Cristo bookshop from which I stole a fairly important detail. I like to think that Santa Gisa could be that place where Paris and Sulcis magically met, as has happened for some time in my soul ”.