I began my apprenticeship at sixteen, in the autumn of 1996, in a small racket shop two streets behind the Stazione Centrale in Milano. My teacher was a man named Armando Stigliani, who had built tennis frames for the Italian Davis Cup squad through the seventies and had, by the time I knocked on his door, retreated into the quieter work of repairing them. He took me on, he said later, because I was the only boy who had asked twice.
For seven years I sanded throats, replaced grommets, restrung frames, and watched him work. After 2003, when Armando closed the shop and went home to his garden in Brianza, I spent the next twenty years building racket frames under other names — for collectors, for two professional players whose contracts forbid me from naming them, for a small Japanese house that imported what I made and signed it as their own. I never put my name on anything. It did not occur to me to want to.
Then, in March of 2023, Armando rang. He was seventy-eight by then, and his voice on the telephone was thinner than I remembered, but the request was very specific. He wanted me to come to the workshop he kept in his garden, the one I had never been invited into, and look at something. He did not say what.
I drove up to Brianza on a Saturday morning. The workshop was a converted greenhouse, the glass partly fogged with age, and inside there was a single bench, a single overhead lamp, and — laid out on a piece of black felt as if it were a relic — a paddle. A teardrop, in carbon. A core of EVA, soft to the press of a thumbnail. And along the throat, traced in a single continuous gesture, a thin motif of gold leaf laid by brush. Armando had been building it, quietly, for two years.
Make few
He let me take the paddle home for a week. I played with it every evening, at the indoor club in Lambrate where I have been a member since the courts opened, and at the end of the week I drove back to Brianza with it wrapped in a tea towel on the passenger seat. I told him I thought it was the most honest paddle I had ever held. I told him I wanted to build it, with his blessing, and put it into the hands of people who would understand what it was.
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said the same words his own teacher had said to him in 1962, when he had taken over the racket shop and asked the older man what advice he had to leave behind.
"Make it slowly, make it right, and make few."
The number he murmured, almost in passing, as he handed the prototype over to me that afternoon was 888. I did not ask him why. I have, in the years since, decided that the number is correct for reasons of arithmetic — four benches working at the pace of careful hands cannot produce many more, in any year I would still recognise as a working year — and for reasons of conscience. A thing made slowly cannot be made many. To pretend otherwise is to break the first promise the thing was supposed to keep.
The first paddle
The first Prima Serie paddle left the atelier in September 2024, eighteen months after the drive home from Brianza. It was numbered 001. I delivered it by hand, in a Milano taxi, to a player in Monza who had been on the registry list since the week we opened it. He opened the walnut case at his kitchen table, turned the paddle over twice in the light from the window, and said only: è viva. It is alive. I have, in the months since, met no description I prefer.
What we are committed to is small and, I hope, clear. Few paddles, made slowly, in a room with south light, in the city where the work began. A number on every throat. A registry that will close when the 888th paddle ships. A promise to look after each of them — every re-grip, every refinish, every change of owner — for as long as the paddle lives. The chapters that follow are about the second and third of those promises. La Bottega is the room where the work happens. Il Numero is what the 888 actually means. This chapter, the first, is only the answer to the question I am asked most often: perché? — and the truth that it began with a phone call, a greenhouse, and a paddle laid on black felt.