The death of a pharmacist who contributed to the culture of a country
The death of a pharmacist particularly troubles me. I have always liked to imagine that inside a pharmacy there is a remedy for everything, for every disease, for every melancholy.
Yes, I believe in fairy tales and pills. And I dote on the pharmacists who don't ask for a prescription, for the professionals who don't want to become corporals in the national health service, for the pharmacists who refuse to degrade themselves to salesmen in the pharmaceutical industry.
I met Giuseppe Sgarbi when he was already retired but I read his memoirs and I can define him as a champion of that type of humanist pharmacist who once, together with the parish priest, the general practitioner, the possible notary, the possible lawyer, set the cultural tone for the towns of the Italian province.
He was a lover of hunting, fishing, good food and beautiful letters, especially the poetry he read to his children and who became Vittorio and Elisabetta Sgarbi also thanks to those verses by Homer, Ariosto, Leopardi. Golden Age! If I dreamed that a common pharmacy could contain a remedy for every ailment, let alone how much I could fantasize about a pharmacy which in turn contained a bookshop… Rest in peace, Giuseppe Sgarbi, while I am not at peace because my trust in poems and pills is shaken.
