On the window of the Alba Abbigliamento shop in Borgo Palazzo, stands the proud window sticker ‘1966 – 2016 fifty years in the Borgo’.
Gianni Mangili and his wife Marilena opened it in the same year that they got married and never left it, not even now that their son Angelo, along with his wife Cristina, runs it.
‘The beginning was very hard – Gianni remembers feeling all that effort on his shoulders – every night we went to bed and we said to ourselves: how will we do tomorrow?’.
He recalls the pressure from the banks and the alternation of periods, sometimes long, of ‘lean cows’ and also those happier and more abundant.
Yet at no time did they think of giving everything up and letting it go: ‘there is only one strategy to move forward and it is to work well and honestly. The cunning ones don’t last long”.
Gianni is tough like the workers of the past: tenacious, tireless and resilient. At the age of eleven he worked for a textile wholesaler, taking care of cleaning and delivering packages. ‘I had a bike with a double rack back and forth. They were very heavy… I was scared every time!” Sometimes he pushed the bales of vegetable fibres (used for mattresses) to the fourth floor.
But it was only a few years later that he adopted a motto that was often repeated in a jingle: ‘Think about keeping on going, not complaining’.
He was fourteen years old when he began working alongside who he now calls one of his mentors: Mario Chinelli. ‘He was a good example – he says tenderly – he always saw everything through rose coloured lenses and, always, completed his work. He infected me’.
And, between a grin and a grimace, he explains about the time when Mr. Mario asked him to carry a cast iron heater, on his shoulders, up to Brunone. ‘You have to get right to the top,’ he said, urging him on and then accompanying him, motivating him ‘don’t worry, you’re nearly there: it’s after the bend’. There were lots of bends and not just to reach the top, but the idea of always looking at one piece at a time has become a real way for him to face daily challenges.
Waiting and insisting are the verbs that Gianni uses most often to describe these fifty years of work.
Angelo, his son who now runs the business, says that he has learned from his parents. Above all he learned about tenacity and kindness and that he added a good deal of prudence in these difficult years.
‘Today we work thanks to everything they have sown and to the good relationships that they have been able to build in the neighbourhood’.
Here we have seen first, second and third generations. “We’ve dressed the children for their communion, then for their wedding and then dressed their children. Think – adds Gianni with amazement – of one of the children who used to come here is now my cardiologist!”.
For them, the clothes must first be comfortable and feel good, then, every year, Mrs. Marilena studies the seasonal colours but is increasingly attentive to the desires and tastes of individual customers. This is when Luisa intervenes – an elegant lady with red hair and a historic customer of the store – spreading her arms and showing herself proudly: ‘I am completely dressed by Alba. She knows what I like and when I pass by on the street, if she has something new, she calls me in to show it to me”. Marisa is Alba for everyone, but also Gianni and Angelo are affectionately called ‘the Albas’.
Their story is a perfect combination of constancy, trust and irony. Kindness is the firm stone on which everything is built: from relationships with customers, with other merchants and with collaborators.
But how can a couple resist working together for so long?
‘Do you see the halo? – Gianni says quickly and smiling – from time to time we have to quarrel and then I walk away, I sing a little bit and then I’m better!”.
For Angelo, on the other hand, the way to resist is his bicycle. At lunchtime, he changes and goes for a long bike ride. ‘I always tell friends who make fun of me: try working with your mum and wife, then tell me if you can’t find the energy for a bike ride!’.