“Good evening and congratulations on your stories! If possible, I would like you to come and interview my dad: Claudio Nocenti, known as Pierino. Today, at the age of seventy-two, he still runs his shop, carefully helping clients. He has always thought only of work and I would be happy to give him this surprise.’
It was Simona Nocenti who wrote to us. She is one of Nocenti Pierino’s, two children. He is owner of the textile shop that’s been in via Palma il Vecchio since 1948. When we decide to go and see her, Simona comes to meet us with eyes full of emotion. She immediately shows us the documents she is compiling for the recognition of her father’s workshop as a ‘historic shop’ of the Lombardy Region.
As is often the case, bureaucracy makes things more difficult. She points out that although her father started his business much earlier with markets around the whole territory, his work is recognised only starting from the actual opening of the shop.
She doesn’t even the have time to tell us anything before Pierino has already walked over and taken two old photographs off the walls. With immense pride, he shows us a corner of via Paglia where they set up the market. A parade of bright fabrics, meticulously ordered by the careful and detailed work of his parents.
Pierino recalls all the places that they took their travelling markets, right up to the border with Switzerland. Bergamo, Martinengo, Osio, Zanica, Lecco – where we stayed for a whole week, sleeping on the truck – and then on to Valtellina.
Amazed by such detail, we ask him how old he was and if he was already working with his family. And it is here that father and daughter exchange a complicit look, which Simona breaks with a ‘Tell them what you were doing!’. In his embarrassed silence, she proceeds proud and amused: ‘At only ten, eleven years of age he ran away from Celana to go and help in the markets with his parents.’
Just as people run away for love, Pierino did the same for work.
And in particular, he tells us, making a little fun of himself, about his first real job. He was the sandwich boy! On the sign, which hung around the neck, was the inscription ‘Everyone to Pierino ‘the Bergamasco’!’
Of those years in the shop he recalls his mother’s calm and seriousness, the good will and the respect that his father had for all customers.
Often his father said to him: ‘When you understand that the negotiation is not going well, stop and take them for a coffee.’ Thanks to the time spent chatting inside the café, it was easier to get in tune with the customer. Even today, carefully reading people who enter the shop is the most important commitment and most important result for Pierino.
“My father said: be right not to get it wrong. And with this he meant: put yourself in the customer’s shoes and respect them, you will receive the same from them. This is what I have done during all these years of work, since we made tailor-made clothes when we started dressing Bergamo’s houses as if they were our own. My greatest satisfaction is that the trust given to us by the fathers is found in the children, and in the children’s children.’
In the end-of-month balance the accounts have to return, but the number that makes the difference is that of who will be return customers.
Today this result is achieved by a consolidated team of people. In addition to Simona there is the other child Giulio who follows the workshop and all the installations and is, according to his father, ‘a hard worker!’. There are also some long-serving shop assistants who have grown up under Pierino’s polite gaze and teachings.
Simona inherited her grandfather’s empathy and her father’s listening skills.
In this beautiful place, amid elegant Florentine linens and Jacquard fabrics, the grateful gaze of a daughter and the perseverance of a father are the recipe for a story that continues.