When you write, you are never alone. At first, we do not think so, but we discover it day by day, living and travelling. Meeting the people we have miraculously reached with this light magic of marks on paper. Of course, writing is also a necessity.
Something knocks inside us, it wants to come out and we have to open up to it. But it does not flow out in words, it must be laboriously translated into a legion of signs, to be strung one after the other like pearls on a long necklace.
In this endeavour to fill in the blank spaces of existence, we occasionally need to reload our weapons, sharp as razors in some cases. In short, we need new sheets, envelopes, inks and colours. Even the nib now scratches the paper a little too much, oh if our pen weighed less, what a dream if it flew sometimes! If only it could keep up with the fast flow, the tangle of thoughts and emotions!
But who can we ask for help in a world of people who hardly write anymore, of distracted and hurried souls? What we need, here and now, since we are stuck in the middle of the concrete, is an angel to lend us one of his pens, something white, because we are really in difficulty... but where are angels usually to be found?
On the ledges of houses, on power lines like swallows? We need an accomplice, perhaps in a delightful place, halfway between the earth and the clouds. In the study of writer Marino Moretti in Cesenatico, an inscription stands out: "this house knows that I am a writer". But it is not an apology for the clutter, just a warning that one is entering a magical place, a retreat. Amongst complicit and discreet walls, which protect from the outside world like perfect servants.
This is Maria Lazzaroni and Maurizio Abrami's shop.
It is an island, a raft for modern castaways. But even if it doesn't look like it, it's a moving raft. I would even say that it is never in Corso Palestro, perhaps it has never even been there. And while the river of life with its rapids rumbles around, silence reigns there. We are talking about writing instruments, portable jewellery, tiny, warm extensions of the soul. They are all here, lined up in bright display cases. From the most inexpensive to the most precious like jewels, but the real writer looks beyond certain details. He seeks the love that they contain, he sees the person who thought them up, who built them, he feels their breath, the dream, the breath of life that generated them. He caresses the objects in this way, testing them, warming them, admiring them. He knows that a fountain pen is a very personal gift, a bond over time, between souls who cannot lose each other. A fountain pen with its ink flowing like vital energy, speaks of us forever, whispers about us while it speaks to others, distributing our sensitivity in a game of echoes, sounds and expectations, of refined ink fillings.
Maurizio Abrami repairs everything, as a collector of vintage objects he proposes exchanges, he invites to try new sensations, to evaluate new sounds, a different touch on paper. As in all fields of art, because the craft of writing flies at art levels, emphasises value, provides quotations. Writing is not only an investment of the soul, it has a business side. But it is the technical advice and solutions that are its forte, solutions dictated by imagination, love of music, and the constant desire to try, to write and rewrite.
The challenge, if anything, is for us, on this side of the glass, in the street. Like when you want to enter an ancient sanctuary, a place of the spirit, you have to take the first step, push the door in front of you. Then a whole new world opens up and emotions invade our souls like a gas. We know very well that we will forget that emotion, that sneaking into a place that we believe cannot belong to our lives at all. Instead, we will discover that we have returned home, that every moment of happiness is in sharing. In a form of innocence of the soul."