Dressed in rubber boots, Gerano passed through Stradanova from the train station. She went to a friend’s house. By the time she got there the tide had retreated. “All kinds of objects, furniture and chairs were stacked up like garbage, and everything was completely wet,” she tells the BBC. As homeowners were busy saving rescue possible, Gerano focused on their books. One of the home books (pictured above) looks like “archaeological discoveries from the Stone Age,” she says. “It’s not open anymore. It’s cemented.”
Patrizia Gerano and Zamagni Arte, RiminiGerano decided that more books needed to be saved. She is called Reno Frizzo, a bookstore in Venice, and the store is properly called Acqua Alta“High Water,” the Venetian name for the flood. Frizzo recently told her he doesn’t remember him being there due to the busy activities of the time. With his employees, they worked non-stop, cleaned up and stored inventory. They made Gerano’s book unrepairable. Most of them are from the early 1900s, and although the standards of Italy and Venice are old, they are not antique. But they were beautiful, like this anthology of this poem, with its lush red fabric covers. “An Injured Book,” says Gerano.
Patrizia Gerano and Zamagni Arte, RiminiGerano took 40 books and placed them in a large black plastic bag. At 55, she was alone on this trip. “There was no way I could carry them all myself. It was difficult to find someone to help me.” She stopped the gondoliere on the canal and convinced him to take her to the station by a gondola. “Some of these books would collapse just by touching my hand,” she says. “You can see the hole on the right,” she added that this particular volume looks precious like lace, and that one day she would like to explore the fantastic words created by the few pages of fragments that were pressed together.
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
