Friends & Collectors "My small objects narrate the world," says Sobrero, and with these worlds he glosses the particular spell that his art holds for writers and bibliophiles, and for anyone who lives by the magic of books. As always, life imitates art: Sobrero enjoys the admiration and friendship of some of the most highly respected literati of Europe. Italo Calvino and Sobrero are fellow travelers in the cosmos. The two artists have had endless conversations about the desire to shrink the world… The friendship with Franco Maria Ricci, publisher and mover of the Italian literary scene, is a story that has shaped the public view of Sobrero's art… Dada Rosso writes: It is not surprising that writers love Ettore Sobrero's tiny bookcases so much. Magically, in very small spaces, they tell infinite stories; they resuscitate pasts, anticipate futures, delve into sentiments, photograph desires, vices, weaknesses, intellectual gifts.     They do it with intelligence and with fondness, mixing irony and sweetness. Sobrero summarizes in his little shelves years and years (forgive me, Ettore, for this anagraphic disclosure…) of careful observation of reality, seen with the eyes not only of the curious person who continues ingenuously to be amazed, but also of the man of culture who possesses the most sophisticated tools for going beyond appearances, well aware of the 'reasons why.'     This is why his bookcases are unerring: there is never a smudge, never a title or a small object out of place, never a random knick-knack, as long as the game does not require it. This is why his inimitable portraits of people, through the story told by a tiny bookcase - that one, exclusively that one, the only one possible - are so terribly faithful to the model, to whoever will own them. It is a complicated undertaking because, more than a photograph and better than a painting, his reduced-scale bookcases, just like real ones, manage to give a sense of an evolution, of a story as it unfolds: titles of a deeper past, of the memory, of duty; titles of today, however complex, many-faceted and dense; objects of memory, objects of the intentions, of the project.     It is a dissection that Sobrero carries out, when he sets those simulacra of little books side by side. He captures, miniaturizing it, the beauty of human complexity, with its contradictions, doubts, second thoughts, enthusiasms and loves.