The Stones Remember – Paperback

Matera, southern Italy, 2013. Marilena Petruzzi is twenty-nine, and every morning she walks forty people along the same hour-and-forty-minute route: the first viewpoint, the rock church, the house furnished the way houses used to be, the square, the coach. The agency pays her a fee per head, and renegotiates it downwards every year. She has known those steps all her life, and her mother still let a bucket down into the cistern under the kitchen floor: but nothing of that has any place in the route she sells.

When a large operator arrives in the city with free shuttles, hotel agreements and all-inclusive packages, the small cooperative of guides Marilena belongs to slowly stops existing. Nobody throws them out; people simply stop finding them. Members sign elsewhere, one of them takes an hourly rate just to get through to December, the office stays locked and cold. Winter begins with nobody able to say what will be sold the following year.

In a vaulted room cut into the rock, what is left of the group stops arguing about prices and asks a different question: what is a visitor actually buying, and what do they own that no catalogue can copy.

A story about work and stubbornness, told without nostalgia and without postcards, in which a city of stone matters less than the people who held it up.

A long story from the Entrepreneurial Stories series, about businesses that recover their worth in what was already around them.