Giulio Einaudi, the man in white

If I had to associate a colour with Giulio Einaudi, it would undoubtedly be white. In fact, I always remember him wearing something white, but above all I picture him moving through white spaces: the publishing house on Via Biancamano in Turin, his home in Rome near Piazza Argentina, not to mention the predominant white of the covers of the books he published. Always understated and elegant, even when he was joking and teasing you, even after drinking several glasses of wine – which had to be of the very best quality, preferably his own, produced in his native Dogliani in Piedmont.

It is no coincidence that Franco Lucentini described him as a “truly great interior designer” – so sure of himself that he would ask well-known architect friends for help and then do things his own way. I read this in a book by Paolo Di Stefano, which is fascinating for its ability to recreate the past through objects. It is “Casa come me: Einaudi”, published by Electa. In fact, “Casa come me” is the title of a new illustrated series, edited by Andrea Cortellessa and Emanuele Trevi, and is inspired by the name Curzio Malaparte gave to his villa in Capri: “Casa come me: between sea and land on the edge of infinity”. And it is on the edge of one’s own infinity that the texts in this series aim to situate themselves; the series “seeks in turn to be a place: one in which the leading figures of art, literature and publishing are portrayed through the lens of their relationship with spaces and with the meaning of living”.

When discussing the Einaudi publishing house on Via Biancamano, Di Stefano inevitably paints a portrait of a group, with its individual quirks and eccentricities – from Cesare Pavese, who would arrive at the office and, without taking off his coat, fling himself down to sleep on his little sofa, to Italo Calvino, who worked in a cramped little office. Everything was governed with dictatorial wisdom by ‘Divo Giulio’, who even determined, through the allocation of space, ‘the symbolic significance of the forces and powers at play’. This was the Giulio Einaudi of his youth and peak creativity, when he distinguished between the people who worked for him by addressing many formally and very few informally. I was (perhaps) fortunate enough to meet him at a time when he had already lost his brainchild, which had changed hands due to unsustainable expenditure. To us young writers and publishers, whom he loved to surround himself with, he addressed us informally and expected us to do the same. He had, however, retained his regal and wonderfully witty demeanour, and insisted on teaching us (quite rightly) not only the technical aspects of putting together a book, but also what we ought to eat: simple yet always exquisite dishes, sometimes cooked by his own hands at our home, but divinely accompanied by bottles brought from his own house.

Returning to Paolo Di Stefano, a novelist and poet who worked as an editor at Einaudi and is currently a columnist for the Corriere della Sera, I would also like to mention the recent reissue – fifteen years after its first publication – of one of his important books, "La catastròfa, Marcinelle 8 agosto 1956" (Sellerio). Seventy years have passed, and that tragedy remains “the gravest in the history of Italian emigration and one of the darkest chapters in the history of labour in Europe”. With the addition of four new chapters, the author takes us to the heart of the events and into the voices of survivors and relatives, crafting an epic, dramatic and instructive novel.