There’s an intimate bond between writing and the body, between thought and gesture. Marco Missiroli, an acclaimed author and a refined voice in contemporary fiction, knows this well: “Writing by hand activates a different part of the brain—the one that thinks narratively, the one that feels.”
Handwriting isn’t just a tool; it’s a place. A place where wrist fatigue, mistakes, and cross-outs aren’t flaws, but marks of humanity. “Writing by hand also means making physical mistakes. Not grammatical ones, but those born of tiredness. That’s where writing becomes authentic—alive.”
Like any ritual, this one, too, demands its own tools. “One of my obsessions,” Missiroli confides, “is the quality of the paper. Good paper, a good pen—these ease the strain. Pineider, in this sense, makes everything smoother. Writing becomes a fluid gesture, even more natural than typing.”
Missiroli writes his novels by hand—not just the first draft: “Handwriting helps me organize my thoughts. I use lots of colors, mark things up, underline. It’s a formative moment, almost physical, that shapes and supports the text before it’s typed.”
These aren’t just notes. His notebooks hold the heart of the novel: “I use them to support the emotional architecture of the story. When the heart of it risks fading or falling apart, that’s where I return.”
Like every writer, Missiroli has his rituals. He always carries three notebooks: one for appointments, one for sketches—he also paints—and a third, precious hybrid by Pineider that follows his writing and cross-disciplinary creativity. At home, he has many more. But not all survive: “I burn a lot of them. They hold things I could never confess. If someone found them one day…”
And so, on the day of the Fogheraccia—March 19, when Rimini celebrates the spring equinox with great bonfires—Missiroli throws pages and secrets into the flames, in an ancient and liberating gesture that makes room for spring and rebirth. Because writing by hand, after all, is also this: a way to let go, and to begin again.