A Bookshop Honoring C. S. Lewis?

Over on substack there is a woman who is chronicling her efforts to open a bookstore honoring to C. S. Lewis.

Sarah Bringhurst Familia discusses her efforts to create "The Wardrobe" in Narni, Italy in her page, Escape to the Bookshop.

The name Narni, she notes, is similar to Narnia. She discovered the town when on vacation in 2022. But, she observes, she was not the first to notice the similarity of the names.

"I was not the first. C.S. Lewis, too, found this city on a map. He loved the name so much he underlined it on a well-thumbed page of his Latin atlas, which his personal secretary, Walter Hooper, later gifted to the town. Narnia is the original Latin name, shortened in Italian to the chic and modern Narni."

She admits to loving the Narnia stories since childhood:

"I grew up reading The Chronicles of Narnia, not once, but over and over. We always seemed to have a set of tattered paperbacks. When one copy got read to death, I’d find another at a secondhand shop. Sometimes I’d check them out from the library too. I read those books so many times that Narnia lives permanently in some corner of my mind."

Indeed, she notes, "I’d spent my whole childhood looking for Narnia—through every stone arch and cupboard door. And though the years passed with nary a glimpse of snowy woods or talking animals, I never quite gave up hope.

"Still, as an adult, I never expected to find Narnia on a map. But there we were, on holiday in Italy, and on the map, I’d noticed a town called Narni. It wasn’t even hard to get to: just an hour and a bit north of Rome."

She and her husband, who currently live in Amsterdam, bought a house in Narni that has a cellar sh believes would be perfect for their bookstore. They are currently cleaning, painting, building bookshelves, looking for furniture, and collecting books.

They have not moved there full-time, but hope to do so soon, and to open The Wardrobe.

Sounds like a worthy dream! Certainly it's fun to follow her quest.