A CHARMING CHOCOLAT IN THE HILLS OF TUSCANY

Diary Of A Tuscan Bookshop

W&N €21

In 2019, inspired by childhood memories and a love of literature, the Italian poet Alba Donati left her 25-year publishing career in Florence to open a bookshop in the village where she was born. ‘Lucignana doesn’t know it’s in the middle of nowhere,’ she writes.

But this tiny village of 180 souls also didn’t know it wanted a bookshop.

The resulting quest, documented in this eccentric and charming little book, takes in crowdfunding, a fire, the pandemic and some magnificent friendships. It’s like Joanne Harris’s Chocolat meets Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop, set in the Tuscan hills, with gardening tips, interior design ideas and gossip woven in.

This is less a book about how to run a bookshop than a celebration of writing, words and people. Reading it is like browsing a library where miniature biographies of village characters and local ghosts sit next to travel guides, botanical dictionaries and literary scoops: Donati once found writer Michael Cunningham (The Hours) in his hotel room ‘sleeping like a baby, naked’.

The bookshop measures ‘two and a half square metres on a craggy little hill… with slanted olive trees’, but it contains the world. In luscious language, the book rejoices in all the things that bring people together. ‘A community is like a special family where you help those who need helping and celebrate with those who have something to celebrate,’ Donati writes. Wherever you find your community, you’ll discover something to celebrate in this delightful book.