Can books cure our emotional wounds, in the same way that medicines cure illnesses? Elena Molini, the founder of Piccola Farmacia Letteraria (literally ‘Small Literary Pharmacy’), believes they can: based on the principles of bibliotherapy, each volume in the bookshop contains a leaflet that guides the reader in their choice, providing treatment instructions, notes on dosage and a list of potential side effects. There are over 4,000 titles to choose from, covering over 90 moods and challenges we all face at certain times in our lives, ranging from heartbreak and low self-esteem to self-discovery.
The two bookshops in Florence – plus a third that has recently opened near La Spezia on Italy’s west coast – are peaceful and welcoming places, where the reader and bookseller alight on the most suitable titles based on dialogue and analysis of the customer’s emotional state. What would, in any other shop, be a cold commercial transaction, is here a human exchange rich in meaning; the simple process of choosing a book has been turned into a moment of care and introspection. The idea stemmed from Elena Molini’s own experience: while working as a sales assistant at a chain bookshop, she noticed that people’s purchases were often driven by their state of mind and what was going on in their lives. So, together with her sister Ester and Deborah Sergiampietri, both professional psychologists, and the bookseller Chiara Pauletto, she decided to embark upon an ambitious project: opening a bookshop on Via di Ripoli in Florence’s Gavinana district offering literary cures. The experience also inspired the plot of Elena’s first novel, La Piccola Farmacia Letteraria, which describes the adventures of Blu Rocchini, a thirty-year-old woman who runs an independent bookshop in Florence prescribing essays and novels as medicines to cure her customers’ various existential ailments.
We interviewed Elena to find out how the original concept underpinning Piccola Farmacia Letteraria works, and how she and her team have managed to create a loyal following in a market dominated by the major chains.
Your customers take a test when they enter the shop to identify the books that best suit their state of mind. Can you explain how it works in more detail?
The idea came to us a couple of years ago, when we started making custom boxes – personalisable gift boxes where we choose the books and objects that best suit the recipient based on the instructions we receive. We reworked the questionnaires we’d created – the goddess archetype, the hero archetype, an attachment test, psychological types and a personality enneagram – to help our customers find the books that are most appropriate for their emotional state and their current stage of life. But there’s no obligation: some people simply come in and buy the book they were looking for, while others decide to do all five of the tests. Once they have finished the various questionnaires, customers are either directed to browse the shelves, which are divided up into themes and moods, or given specific reading suggestions. Alternatively, they can ask us for help or let the leaflets attached to the books guide them – each colour corresponds to a different emotion.
Books can be as addictive as drugs: do you have many regular customers who come back repeatedly to make new purchases?
At the Gavinana bookshop we have a loyal and regular clientele who come back again and again to buy books either as gifts for others or as a treat for themselves. Our central Florence shop, which was designed to target people from outside the city, gets more one-off visitors, with the exception of the students from the nearby Faculty of Arts, who are now regulars. We’ve also gained a number of loyal readers via our online shop; they regularly order books, boxes and objects from us despite the merciless competition we face on the web.
You have one bookshop in the centre of Florence, a stone’s throw from Piazza Brunelleschi, and another in Gavinana on the outskirts of the city. How do the different locations influence the types of customers you get?
We definitely have a younger, mostly female clientele in the city centre shop, including people from outside Florence; plus we get foreign tourists who have read my novel La Piccola Farmacia Letteraria and want to see our business in real life. Mostly the people who come to our Gavinana shop are local residents: mums with kids and people of a certain age – your typical bookshop types.
You’ve recently opened a new bookshop in Luni, near La Spezia. Why did you choose such a small place for it?
We had the idea following the success of our temporary bookshop in Ca’ Lunae, a winery near La Spezia that has hosted us for the last two summers. Taking inspiration from my latest novel La bottega delle seconde occasioni, we decided to open a shop in a small provincial town, near the places where my sister Ester, my cousin Lianca and I were born and to which we still feel a strong attachment. Of course, getting a bookshop off the ground in somewhere with a population of 8,000 is a bit of a gamble… we’ll see how it goes!
The new bookshop is called Il cuore di Lianca – Libreria e cartoleria creativa (Lianca’s Heart – Bookshop and Creative Stationer’s) What does this new venture involve, and how does it relates to your ‘literary therapies’?
The owner Lianca Frigelli is a former biologist who worked in pharmaceuticals but always harboured a passion for reading and creative stationery. You could say that she decided to move from pharmacological treatments to literary ones! Paper therapy, which is still little known in Italy, involves returning to using paper and writing by hand, and employs various techniques and activities to help people hone their creativity, understand themselves better and attain mental wellbeing. Starting in 2026, Lianca will run a series of courses focused on writing, drawing and painting, including one on journaling, an activity where you use a personal diary to express ideas and emotions and reconnect them to your inner self. Scrapbooking, meanwhile, is all about creating albums from photos, clippings, stickers, ribbons, coloured paper and stamps that keep track of the events and major phases in your personal and family life.
Unfortunately, people are not reading as much as they used to: can the Piccola Farmacia Letteraria concept convince even the most reticent readers to buy a book?
We live in an era when digital tools have taken over the little free time we have at our disposal. Scrolling through social media and watching films are less cognitively taxing than reading, and so it is only natural that many people are reading less than in the past. However, our bookshop promotes reading not as a hobby, but as a therapeutic activity that can help people rediscover serenity and mental wellbeing, overcome trauma and connect with their deepest emotions and desires. We therefore get people browsing the shelves of Piccola Farmacia Letteraria who don’t read much, but who are drawn to the idea that a book could help them tackle a challenging moment in their life or reduce their interior suffering. Or, even better, that the right novel could give them the impetus they need to take a decision they had been putting off due to a lack of awareness or fear of change.
All that remains now is to suggest you plan a visit to one of the Piccola Farmacia Letteraria shops, and, in the meantime, let yourself be tempted by the books and other items on their website: who knows, perhaps your perfect literary cure is there, just waiting to be discovered!