We met Franco Mondini on a spring day, in 2008. He showed up in the shop for the first time.
"They spoke well of you to me". He brought us a bag with at least 30 pairs of chopsticks, each different from the other, asking us to exchange them: they were all mismatched, some used but for the respect we owed him, we didn't feel like saying no and we satisfied him, in some way.

“I am a pain in the ass and I will drive you crazy but, trust me: I will become a great customer. And above all, we will become friends ".

And he was right. On both.

Franco was one of the people we most saw fooling around in the shop; memorable one day in January many years ago when there was, literally, a meter of snow in the street and at a certain point the doorbell rang: it was him. With his 500 he had come here to buy who knows what, the only customer that day.

We often stopped to chat at the bar, we with the coffee and he with the standard beer. He was one of those people full of anecdotes and we had also known him through two books he wrote: "Fuck Fiction" is "On the road with Chet Baker and all the others".

Both autobiographical: raw, with continuous flashbacks and without discounts the first, an ups and downs in the life of a young musician between the 50s and 60s, made up of drugs, sex, travel and the art of getting by, with memories of Resistance, war and hunger, seen through the eyes of a child; the second is more of a costume, a true portrait of what jazz was like in a nutshell in Italy, with many funny stories and characters that may seem incredible to us.
Not everyone can tell of having spent weeks with Philly Joe Jones in a house in Turin, having played at the opening at Miles Davis or having played for years with Chet Baker.
In this regard, Franco always told us and not without pride, that when he was interviewed as soon as he was released after sixteen months in prison, a rotogravure journalist asked Baker what he intended to do from that moment on. "First of all, I'll call Franco Mondini and we will form a group together". And when he told us about it, Franco would light up.
When a dear friend of ours told him that it was a great luck to have played with Chet Baker, Mondini replied in his own way: “Good fuck, I didn't play there one night by chance! I've been playing there for years! ". Amen.

Memorable even when years ago, at a clinic with Mike Clark, the latter bowed when they introduced Franco, calling him Maestro.

He met and was friends with all the greatest jazz musicians in the world. We often talked about the state of jazz in Italy and he was not very diplomatic: he saved his friendship with Enrico Rava, of whom he had been mentor, and a few others. Basically, it bored him. Perhaps this was the reason why he left the activity of professional musician to devote himself to journalism, becoming a pen of La Stampa.

Often when we put on some jazz records we asked him if he knew whose it was: only by listening to two notes was he able to tell you the name of the producer. He was a music fanatic. In his house there were shelves full of memorabilia and the collection continued.

He was in love with Billie Holiday. "The Greatest Pussy Ever Seen on Earth". Every so often he stopped at the office to look at a poster of his own of the Holiday. "Will you sell it to me? Where did you buy it? ".

We gave it to him one day, identical and framed, and then we saw it at his house during a visit, on display in the living room.

He did not have an easy character: with him every day was a surprise. He sent us to fuck off countless times, in no uncertain terms, because maybe he didn't like something or because we didn't serve him as he wished and there are countless times he hugged us and told us he loved us and that we were his brothers. "We're fucking friends!". With him you could really talk about everything as if he were a kid.

We were lucky enough to see him play live and boy, with those brushes he flew like a butterfly. In recent years he had devoted himself to the study of percussion, but then he always returned to the kick drum, snare drum and laughs.

He was a big hustler, with continuous exchanges and there are countless times he came to the shop in search of the perfect wand, his true obsession. Needless to say, he always fell in love with discontinued or unavailable models, driving us crazy every time in search of the impossible.

We hadn't seen him for some time and even our mutual friends didn't know anything about it.

Today, the news of his disappearance. We are sorry that we have not looked for him again, that we have not been informed about his state of health and that we have not greeted him as we would have liked.

We are sure, that's why he would have sent us to fuck up once again. To then hug us immediately after.

Hi Franco, we loved you!

Franco, in one of the countless times he bought a snare drum to bring it back the next day telling us it sucked