Everything except newspapers. Newsagents are making a comeback – how marvellous. It’s a shame it isn’t true.

It is a surprise to read in several newspapers that newsagents are experiencing a new spring and are flourishing once more, strong and proud. That the decline of newsagents – a glaring sign that nobody reads newspapers any more – may be experiencing a resurgence. That many enthusiastic individuals are organising themselves to reopen those temples of the printed word – and ‘temples’ is indeed the right word, for the term ‘edicola’ has noble and ancient origins, deriving from the Latin ‘aedicula’, a dwelling and refuge for the gods; and ‘edicule’ is still the name given to those niches on street corners containing statuettes of the Virgin Mary or saints, to which devout hands offer bouquets of flowers in exchange for protection and comfort. In short, it is time to stop viewing newsagents as relics of an era that has definitively passed, like telephone boxes, pedal-operated sewing machines, large families, cinemas and record players. Newsagents are being reborn – what a marvel, what a miracle, what a moving sight. What a joy. It’s a pity it isn’t true.

To be clear, it is not that the reopening of some newsagents—always in the big cities, and incidentally rarer than is being portrayed—is not true. However, the newsagents that are reopening are anything but temples to the printed newspaper. If a customer requests a newspaper, the new or ‘post-newsagent’ shopkeeper retrieves it from some hidden corner of the temple, buried under a thousand things and bits and bobs that, unfortunately, aren’t newspapers, whilst the shopkeeper is astonished that there’s still anyone interested in those paper objects that younger people regard as exotic curiosities. However, you will find mountains of scratchcards and various lottery tickets offering the hope of a lucky win—prizes of a hundred or even two hundred euros. There are also plenty of cheap plastic toys and dolls (a defiant challenge to the commodity apocalypse of the demographic winter). Collections of figurines of ancient Romans, ferocious beasts, dragons and dinosaurs; miniature items for the perfect kitchen; so-called ancient coins; swords – according to the promotional blurb – used by Julius Caesar or Attila. Scissors and nail-care kits. An abundance of stickers, postcards, esoteric leaflets and holy cards in various sizes. Mobile phone top-ups and even assistance with paying bills. Occasionally umbrellas and parasols, as in Chinese shops. Beers, soft drinks and mineral water (for the more discerning: beverage services). However, these may only be taken from the sponsored fridge, as the surviving newsagents – and the new, eager ones – do not hold licences to sell alcohol.

At newsagents with sufficiently spacious premises, games of burraco are also organised, particularly for older customers. Before closing its shutters, the newsagent closest to my home—who is kind and always helpful, though increasingly despondent—tried to offset the gradual disappearance of newspapers and their buyers by selling tickets for buses, trams and the underground (in competition with tobacconists), However, digitalisation has now rendered even paper tickets largely obsolete, and those who pay—when they do—typically do so using their smartphones (a practice I have observed firsthand). He had also tried to diversify his range by offering his increasingly scarce customers exquisite mozzarella from Cilento or tins of delicious Sicilian olive oil (causing a stir at the nearest grocery shop, which accused him of unfair competition). But in the end, every attempt proved futile. Today, that former temple of newspapers—the newsagent’s, the heir to the aedicula—has reopened its doors, mainly serving beers in the evenings as part of a mini-nightlife scene that, sadly, pays no heed even to the final call of the printed press: the covers of “Tex” comics, yellowed by time, continue to fill the side windows of the kiosk. A new spring for newsagents?

At newsagents in central Rome—given, moreover, the desolating effect of the dwindling local population and the massive influx of tourists who do not appear to be keen on buying "Remnin Ribao" (if Chinese) or "Berlingske" (if Danish) as their primary shopping priority— the newspapers are literally vanishing, buried beneath white images and figurines of various sizes depicting the successive Popes of recent decades—whether deceased, having resigned or seriously ill—at a rate that multiplies the proliferation of papal depictions and fills the newsagents as if they were religious souvenir shops next to the Vatican. Or by images of St Peter’s and the Colosseum, leaflets, maps and itineraries for ‘Rome’s must-see sights’, gladiators, emperors, ladies and matrons of ancient Rome lined up as in Neapolitan nativity scenes, drawings of the fire started by Nero, depicted strumming his lyre (despite the historical revisionism that disputes the veracity of the event – not the fire itself, but its alleged perpetrator), colourful leaflets on the capital’s attractions, and illustrated guides to museums that one would never see on a 48-hour tour of Rome. Yet the true core of the business of these heroically reopened newsagents – which make one shout with admiration at the rebirth of those extraordinary wonders of the past – has nothing to do with newspapers, neither the print ones nor even the online ones, nor even those of the so-called ‘digital edition’. It has nothing to do—not even remotely—with anything comparable to or akin to the printed press, the world of journalism, or the realm of information in its various forms. It has to do with the exchange of parcels. To compensate for the disappearance of two other pillars of yesterday’s world (copyright Stefan Zweig)—namely the noble institution of the doorman and large families where there was always someone at home to answer the intercom—customers of Amazon or other online shops provide the newsagent’s address for the delivery of parcels they have purchased. Newsagents then send a message saying ‘the parcel has arrived’ and charge a modest commission on each delivery (paid by the seller, who does not want to lose customers). It is a constant cycle of unloading and collecting, and sometimes the person collecting a parcel may even decide to buy a newspaper: double the profit, and a step closer to ensuring the survival of the once-prestigious newsagent’s. After all, a brave and enterprising new newsagent, interviewed as part of a journalistic investigation into the supposed revival of newsagents, confessed that, on a good day, he manages to sell 25 copies of the daily papers. A few years ago, he reveals, it was 250.

In the twentieth century, in that world that has now vanished, there were perhaps three or four times as many – in any case, a great many. In 1990 there were around 40,000; today there are just over 10,000, and almost two-thirds of the smallest municipalities do not have a single one: if you want to buy a newspaper, you have to go quite a way. The newsagent’s was a crucial fixture in neighbourhoods and districts; sometimes, in the more affluent neighbourhoods, there were as many as three along the sides of a single block. It was a thriving profusion of daily newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, magazines – local and national, party-affiliated, opinion-based – and ‘second newspapers’ to add to the first, which was practically a must-have. Newsagents have made an appearance in Italian novels, from Leonardo Sciascia’s Il giorno della civetta to Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore. In the final years of abundance, thanks to the uncontrolled proliferation of what were termed ‘supplements’, newsagents also filled up with video cassettes offering a vast selection of films, books, museum catalogues, and even encyclopaedias in instalments, which were initially said to would ‘build loyalty’ amongst readers, who – if faithful – could have at home a decent film collection, a series of classics bearing the logo of their chosen newspaper, art history manuals, and comprehensive encyclopaedias and dictionaries. These were the last gasps of a culture of newspaper reading that found its temple in newsagents (aedicula, to reiterate). Today’s newsagents, reborn with a completely different identity and hailed as if they were a new spring, are like deconsecrated churches where religious services have been lost forever, becoming anonymous venues hosting concerts and the most varied ‘events’. Newspapers were the subject of discussion, the cause of arguments, and a source of belonging: often, the headline of the paper just bought from the newsagent would peek out from the horizontal pockets of one’s coat, proudly displayed. The newsagent’s also became a stage for the human comedy. After midnight in Rome, people would head to the newsagents near the seat of power to pick up newspapers still hot off the press. When setting off very early by train, at dawn, whilst the newsagents were still unwrapping the last bundles of newspapers held tight by sturdy strings, queues would form at the station newsstand with anxious travellers – their eyes constantly on their watches – hurrying so as not to be late for the platform but unwilling to miss out on their daily paper. On trains (and often on planes), the newspaper trolley would make its rounds through the aisles, and you’d have to hope there was still a copy of your favourite left. After a while, when asked, ‘Newspapers?’, people began to reply, ‘No, thank you’, and you could already sense that a world had come to an end.

My grandfather, who hailed from Puglia and was homesick, would give me a generous allowance to go to the newsagent’s in Piazza San Silvestro, which – the only one in the city – sold a copy of the “Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno” (albeit from the previous day) because, with a subscription, the issue was often delayed due to a backlog of copies, a victim of the painfully slow postal service, and couriers did not yet exist. Outside the newsagent’s near the house where I lived as a boy, seven days a week, including Sundays after Mass, a secondary school teacher would stand—a man as authoritative and erudite as he was embittered by his less-than-prosperous financial circumstances—and the newsagent would allow him to read the front pages of some twenty newspapers: the scene somewhat resembled the down-and-out aristocratic freeloader Vittorio De Sica with the newsagent Alberto Sordi in the marvellous film Il Conte Max. Often, however, in addition to the front pages, he would read several inside pages as well, because the prestigious but financially strapped customer wanted to ensure that on that very day—who knows, perhaps as fate would have it—reviews of his, as he put it, “latest literary endeavour” had not been published: yet the reviews never appeared, neither for the latest nor the penultimate literary labour; yet the merciful newsagent turned a blind eye and, after a few days, indulged the requests of the erudite supplicant. Newspapers could only be bought at newsagents’ or from street vendors at traffic lights, and I recall that at lunchtime my father would occasionally return home with his two daily papers and, tucked away between them—carefully hidden to make the surprise all the more delightful— a small pile of packets containing footballers’ stickers – the sole eccentricity offered by a shop that was not merely a shop selling any old goods, but a small temple in the form of a kiosk, exclusively dedicated to the fulfilment of Hegel’s ‘morning prayer of the secular man’: the reading of (print) newspapers. In every city, newsagents were topped with signs bearing the names of the most widely read local newspapers: La Stampa in Turin, Il Messaggero in Rome, Il Mattino in Naples, and so on. There was very little scope for misunderstanding the name of the paper: if you said ‘Il Corriere, please’, you couldn’t go wrong; in Rome, however, they would ask you, ‘della Sera or dello Sport?’. The counter was overflowing with newspapers; they dominated the front and the sides, and sometimes even the tables set up outside if they couldn’t all fit inside the newsagent’s. Tucked away were the pornographic magazines (Playboy and, to a lesser extent, Playmen – though they, too, enjoyed a place of honour despite the wrath of the prudes), which we beardless, awkward lads would buy in turns or by drawing lots because we were ashamed and didn’t want to look like regular buyers of ‘Jacula’, ‘Sukia’ or ‘Zora the Vampire’. Today, with the internet, everything is easier. Today, the world of newsagents has vanished, and no Amazon parcel will be able to bring them back to the way they used to be. Perhaps – hopefully for the newsagents – to a new lease of life. Like on trains? ‘Would you like a newspaper?’ No, thank you.