Dear Director Feltri,
When an newsstand closes everything it becomes saddest. The road, the neighborhood, the city is sad. It is a sadness that expands like magnetic waves and penetrates in every heart involving all that part of the universe that lives on culture, knowing, love and peace. A newsstand that closes you almost like when a poet dies, when you see a burnt tree, a beaten child, a mistreated animal, a family that breaks, a friend who deceives you, a ungrateful son, a hungry man, a bum he sleeps on a cardboard, the corpse of the clandestine who was looking for freedom and work in a new homeland. When a newsstand closes it becomes sad as when you see the injustices of that part of the bad world that lives only for the god-adenaro, as when you read that the old hospitalized in a nursing home are mistreated, that those such politicians have stolen, that those servants of the state have betrayed their oath of fidelity, that there is a youth desperately looking for work while every day they close by the street. workers. When an newsstand closes is like a beautiful fairy tale that ends and you realize that the number of those who can no longer live “happy and happy” increasingly increases!
Raffaele Pisani
Dear Raffaele,
I interpret to perfection, although in a much more poetic way, my thoughts, indeed my feeling, which I often share, especially with my wife Enoe, who complains about the closure of the newsstands in our neighborhood, northern area of Milan. Since we have lived here, only for a few years, there are several those who have sealed their doors, so that being able to buy the newspapers in the morning has become an impossible feat. Between 2020 and 2024 there were 2700 newsstands closed throughout Italy (Unioncamere report), there were 129 in Milan. They are the numbers of a massacre, the massacre of newspapers. And you see these metal carcasses on the street, these empty boxes, which once exhibited magazines of all kinds and stopped there, teenagers and children, men and women, even just to browse. Yes, the newsstand was a pivot around which the neighborhood community revolved, life, sociability. Going to the newsstand was daily activity. A ritual? Perhaps, like that of coffee. Certainly a dear habit, to put aside that, that is, to give up, it even entailed suffering, as your letter testifies. It is said that “it is worth closing since no one reads the newspapers and we all informed about the network”, although approximately, but it is also true that many people, like you, like me, who had the use of getting the paper, when the newsstand a stone’s throw has been declared finished, has no longer had the opportunity to buy and read their favorite newspaper. We had to organize in some way to make up for this lack, to solve this disservice, to be able to fill this void. When I see the closed newsstands, a profound sadness assails me as I realize that it is the sunset of an era that was happy for me, an era in which it was read, we informed ourselves, we were preserved healthy and virtuous uses, we participated, since making themselves educts about what happens in the world and in our country or in our city is also and above all to make itself active citizens, civil beings. Yes, a form of active participation, which decreases every time that another newsstand still, yet another, undergoes the definitive lowering of the gate.
But closed newsstands also mark the dawn of a new era, the one in which everything takes place in an virtual elsewhere in which we move as zombies and people no longer meet, that is, people no longer place each other in front of the other.
We do not touch the newspapers and we no longer touch other human beings. Everything is lived with some filters, screen, protection.
The thing a little terrifies me. Where are we going? Where will we arrive? Isn’t this abdication to our humanity?