Edicolas: Death of the Italian newsstand as sad as the news it sells

When Vinicio Di Leva opened his newsstand in 1988, it was a buzzing hive of activity. Regular clients would come by and he’d hand him their daily papers knowing exactly what they wanted. They’d stay and chat. Crowds of young and old would gather, making his newsstand on Viale dei Quattro Venti in my Monteverde neighborhood in Rome a cafe hangout without the caffe.

Today, his sales have dropped 50-60 percent. He’s looking to get out in two years, joining a mass exodus that has crippled an underappreciated Italian institution.

The edicola, the Italian newsstand. It is rapidly going the way of the payphone and Internet cafe.

“I’m bitter,” the 67-year-old told me Saturday morning. “The guilty party is the government. The government is to blame for how it has set up life today. Everybody stays on the cell phone. People are looking at their cell phones all day. The people take the cell phones and don’t read but scroll.”

He had plenty of time to talk. In my 15 minutes with him, he had only two other customers. One man got his daily newspaper; a woman wanted to buy Metro public transportation tickets. I’ve known Vinicio for about four years. That’s about the time when the edicola on my corner closed, not long before another closed across the street.

And not long after another closed up the street.

The numbers

According to the National Independent Newsagents Union, in the early 2000s Italy had about 40,000 edicolas. In 2024 there were fewer than 12,000. Nearly half no longer even sell newspapers and magazines.They’ve gone to souvenirs and boutique novelty gifts.

Twenty-five percent of Italian towns no longer have an edicola. Ten have closed in Monteverde and neighboring Trastevere alone. One on Via Portuense, a major street near me, even folded on Saturday as Vinicio and I talked.

Vinicio’s edicola is across the street from the Quattro Venti train station, and I’d stop by on my way home from Marina’s. Without me asking, he’d hand me my Corriere dello Sport or, if it’s a Saturday, La Gazzetta dello Sport and its SportWeek Saturday magazine supplement.

There is never a line.

As much as the edicola owners are saddened by the decline, so am I. I’m an old-school, old-time newspaper man. (Ah hell, I’m old. I turn 70 this month.) I love the feel of a newspaper in my hand. My idea of perfect, consistent bliss in my retired life in Rome is taking my Corriere dello Sport to my corner Romagnani Caffè and sit on its sun-splashed porch with my cappuccino bencaldo and fagottino chocolate pastry.

I’d read for a couple hours, turning through all 50-60 pages of my beloved soccer news. 

I subscribe to the New York Times online edition and as much as I love the best newspaper in the world, I loathe scrolling down my cell phone like a teenager on Instagram. A newspaper, a real newspaper, feels like you’re touching history. The pictures are bigger. The headlines are bolder. The news is grander.

A newspaper in hand feels like a lazy Sunday morning with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

The death of the edicola has little to do with the shop itself. The distinct dark green round huts with magazines and newspapers displayed on the side haven’t changed. People have. Newspapers are dying and, thus, so are the places selling them.

According to the Rome newspaper Il Tempo, overall newspaper sales in Italy have dropped 30 percent from 2020-2024. Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most influential paper, has gone from a daily circulation of 246,000 in 2023 to 231,000 in 2024, a drop of 6 percent.

Rome-based Il Messaggero has suffered a year to year decline of 10 percent. Even my beloved Corriere dello Sport and La Gazzetta dello Sport have both dropped 13 percent in the last year.

It’s not just Italy. We’re a small dot falling over a high waterfall that is the collapsing newspaper industry. According to the Northwestern University’s Medill State of Local News, the number of newspapers in the United States has gone from 7,325 in 2005 to 4,490 last year. That’s a drop of nearly 40 percent.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that weekday circulation sales have dropped from 55.8 million in 2000 to 24.2 million in 2020, a drop of nearly 60 percent. 

Talking to my fellow sportswriter brethren during last month’s Winter Olympics in Cortina, the Los Angeles Times’ sports section is down to nine sportswriters. They no longer cover the Los Angeles Angels and Clippers home games.

The reasons

Why? 

I don’t need Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward to find out. I look around. Everyone has their nose buried in a cell phone. On public transport, I occasionally glance over people’s shoulders. Are they reading a Corriere della Sera op-ed piece? 

No. They’re playing games of broken dams and falling fruit. They’re texting friends using more abbreviations than the UN directory. They’re watching cat videos. Vinicio’s best-selling item is a crossword puzzle magazine.

He used to sell 500 copies of Il Messaggero a day. Now he sells 20-25.

“No one reads the newspaper,” Vinicio told me. “The generation under 40 doesn’t read the newspaper. Only the old people. We’ve become a shop that sells toys for children. The family has children and buys toys or little books with mice. 

“When the children grow up, they don’t buy anything. They disappear.”

My closest edicola is about a five-minute walk down Via Donna Olimpia near my old gym. Roberta Marconi is a fourth-generation edicola owner and has worked in the same hut since 1992. She said her business had dropped in the last five-10 years about 70 percent.

“This work will die because the old people will die,” she said. “The old people buy the newspaper but it is a very low percentage. The very young person doesn’t buy anything in the edicola. The person in the school buys some newspapers to bring into the class but no young person opens the newspaper.”

While the edicola was dying a slow death, Covid sunk the dagger deeper. Italy had two major lockdowns. Everything closed, including edicolas. People stayed home and those interested in the news took out online subscriptions.

When the edicolas returned, their clients didn’t.

Life in an edicola

Running an edicola isn’t easy. Vinicio opens at 4:30 a.m. when the newspapers arrive. He closes at 3:30 p.m. and goes home for an hour. He returns and works until about 8 p.m. Unlike the old days, no edicola is open late at night.

He makes only 18 percent off each newspaper. Since Covid, costs in Rome have gone up about 20 percent, including renting the small spaces edicolas occupy. 

Profit margins are small. Try finding a young Italian who wants that kind of life.

“Everybody who does this is in difficult times,” he said.

So what is the edicola’s future? Will people some day look at edicolas like ancient monuments, relics of a past when people valued things like … you know, knowledge? 

Andrea Di Silvio isn’t optimistic. Two years ago he placed a big banner atop his edicola on Via Sacchetti, a major street near Marina’s home in the Battistini neighborhood in southwest Rome. It reads, “Chi vuole la fine delle edicole? (Who wants the end of the newsstands?)”

“Other newsstands have done the same to raise public awareness,” said the 61-year-old Andrea. “Along with the banner on the newsstand, I and other newsstands have distributed an informational flyer. In my opinion, there will always be a niche audience that reads newspapers.”

But that niche is getting smaller and no longer able to support hundreds of little newsstands. Andrea said 10-15 years ago he sold 10 times the editorial products he does today. 

He admits he’s sad. Like me, he loves sitting with a newspaper in hand and reading about the world. He recently started a weekly newsletter called Andrea’s Feuilleton which he hands out free to his dwindling number of clients. Last week he waxed poetic about the death of the newspaper and how we no longer have a means to start our daily conversations.

“I predict the disappearance of traditional newsstands,” he said. “I believe only small sections within tobacco shops or bars will remain to carry newspapers as while newsstands are drying, the paper itself will not.”

The redesigns

Some edicolas are changing with the times. They’ve stopped stocking traditional newspapers and magazines and substituting souvenirs, postcards, T-shirts and novelty foods.

In 2019, Andrea Mercuri transformed her edicola near the Vatican to a stand that sells independent magazines from around the world, designer snacks and souvenirs. They host “pop-ups” in which new hotels will give them promotional T-shirts and novelty items to sell. They launch new books.

The first of these opened in Perugia in 2016. Andrea opened the first in Rome and relabeled it Edicola Erno. Its website says “Erno’s goal is to offer the city new projects and visions and to connect people in the creative world.”

Elisa Zamataro, working the stand on Sunday, said sales are going “really good.”