Vite senza fine

Gio Magnasco, still a young boy on the threshold of the twentieth century, plays with a nail and a washer. It is a sign of the destiny that awaits him: he will become a hardware wizard. Gio Magnasco is a homo faber (“man the maker”): he carries within himself the myth of rationality and progress. But he also carries a deep melancholy within, a feeling of longing that can never be fulfilled. Like his love for the daughter of the shipowner Perrone, which will last for his entire life but will almost always remain confined to his own thoughts. Gio Magnasco connects opposites and makes them complementary, like keys and locks, like male and female dowels. That is why his strange store sells screws and hooks but also buttons, laces, and ribbons: it is the only hardware-haberdashery store in the world. As he says, “I like putting things together, and for them to stay together.”