Herr Bonilli Zimmer drei

Nine years after his passing, here is a fun memory of our professional career together, about when Stefano Bonilli decided to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair.

“I’m going to the Frankfurt Buchmess (book fair) to try and find an international publisher for our wine guide, or at least one for the German edition”. This is how the story began, in 1988 if I remember well. My response, as well as that of Franco Azara, who was CEO at Manifesto at the time, and Andrea Gabbrielli, who had begun working with us a year or so earlier, was: “But you don’t even speak a word of German, or English for that matter, how are you going to pull it off? Plus, it’s going to cost for the trip and hotel, and you’ll have to buy lunch and dinner, where is the money going to come from?”

But Stefano Bonilli was not worried about these “practical” problems, he just wanted to find a publisher and he had to go to Frankfurt, or Mainhattan as they like to call it. He found a cheap little hotel, drove there in his Fiat Uno and we all chipped in to get a very small stand at the fair. A few months earlier, he and I went to Bern to speak with the administrators at the Hallwag publishing house and so part of the work was already done. What we needed to do now, he said, was to be seen and convince our potential partners that we were not just “the usual Italians”.

And so, after a day’s driving, Bonilli got to his little hotel outside Mainhattan, the nickname for Frankfurt on the Main River. He had said earlier that “Everyone in Germany speaks English, I can make myself understood and you can, too”. Famous last words. He could not make himself understood, nor we, but we were young and enthusiastic and we had to come up with something. And besides, after inventing Gambero Rosso and Arci Gola we had become experts at leaping before looking.

What followed next was a cross between tragi-comedy and pure brilliance. First of all, it was not true that everyone in Germany spoke English, for sure the person at the hotel’s front desk didn’t. When we tried to phone him (landline no cellphones back then), in reply to our request “Mr. Bonilli, please”, all we got a sharp and totally incomprehensible reply in German. And so we decided to change strategy, because Annalisa Barbagli, who had by then begun working with us, knew a little German and told us that we should have said: “Herr Bonilli Zimmer drei” which means “Mr. Bonilli, room three”. We phoned at 7pm and I, Franco Azara and sometimes Andrea Gabbrielli, would take turns asking and all we got was the same sharp and incomprehensible reply in German and he wouldn’t put us through. We didn’t understand a thing but kept trying and soon “Herr” became the Roman dialect “Er” and so it became “Er Bonilli zimmerdrai”, and hearing this Roman-German dialect we broke out laughing while on the other end the concierge got very angry.

The brilliant part was that despite all the difficulties involved, Stefano was able to work out an agreement with the Bern publisher Hallwag because Beat Koelliker, their editorial director at the time, spoke a little Italian. When Stefano got back he called us together and, after adequately scolding us because the concierge at the front desk treated him very badly, which he said was all our fault, he said: “While you were all goofing off here, I convinced those Swiss to publish a German edition of our wine guide”. And they did.

This was another side of Stefano and, nine years after his death, this is how I want to remember him.