As a boy he draws at the seaside. And it is in that very place that he finds his first chances to express and refine the graphic style that has set him apart ever since. What follows is one experiment after another, one attempt after another — some of them not especially successful —, and they allow him to develop a critical eye that will mark him for all the years to come.

A series of fortunate encounters, apparently by chance, lead him to look more closely into the workings of graphic publishing, with a few collaborations and opportunities he does not let slip. If you ask him, he will admit it plainly:

Trying to classify the flair of a vision that from the very start shows itself to be heterogeneous and unlike the standards of illustration and comics is no easy matter. Guided more by instinct than by reason, Rondini often finds himself following his own way of conceiving graphic work, self-taught, almost like a naïve. And so the line turns dirty, deliberately jagged, the colour becomes unusual and carries the right emotion by setting the most varied contrasts side by side, stubbornly and unexpectedly.

And his gesture has been in the workshop manuals since the fourteenth century and it has a name: terra verde laid under the flesh tones, because green is the complement of red and takes the pink out of it until it looks like skin.

Rondini does not learn in a school, but by measuring himself against people who already illustrate and draw professionally for magazines well known to those in the trade. That is where he learns a way of working that goes beyond technique, and that is the strong expression of a way of thinking and of a social attention he feels called to.

«An artist communicates what he sees and in what he does he often points to a problem and underlines it; an intellectual takes that problem on and proposes a solution», Rondini says with conviction, then smiles: «And in any case, it is by no means certain that I belong to either category, let that be clear».

Like a true artisan, Rondini and the publishing house Bookendipity.com face every step of turning a manuscript into a printed book with courage and determination, every time. And if something then does not work, it is put right together with the author. Working on the editing, the structure, the title, the right series to publish it in, the graphic design and the way that book will present itself to someone who does not yet know it: these are duties, to be carried out with the respect owed both to the person who wrote the text and to the person who will read it.

Rondini does not treat the author as a supplier of text to be left untouched out of politeness. He brings the author into the creative process and, when he sees a better possibility, he says so. Some books change shape; others change title; others still are pushed to state more clearly what they were only brushing against. He describes himself, with a phrase that suits him, as «the provoker of ideas, the book-breaker». The phrase works because it describes a real editorial act: breaking the provisional balance of a manuscript to see whether, put back together, it becomes stronger.

This is also where a publisher's skill is measured. Correcting a typo is necessary, but it is not enough. You have to work out where the reader will stop believing in a character, where a chapter repeats the one before it, where a title promises the wrong book, where a cover tries to be beautiful without being exact. Rondini does not sell the idea that everything an author hands in is already sacred. He grants the author something more useful: the right to be taken seriously enough to be contradicted.

The first experiment is born of the need to counter an all too widespread habit: children are by now used to receiving what they know and learn through a screen, so much so that they regard the paper book with little involvement and some suspicion.

This is the essential point to start thinking from: the reason a child closes a book after two pages.

And so Gabriele Rondini sets to work and, with the complicity of a teacher who had used this system in her own career as a sound means of training, creates a small volume called Leggi & Gioca: six animal stories and six manuals of traditional games, to be played in person. You read, then you stop and you play, in a group, with your whole body, in the classroom or at a party. The manuals contain everything needed by anyone who wants to try the experience: recommended age, rules, the referee's role, materials, space required, variants. A QR code opens the rest online, free of charge, so that whoever wants to use it need not be an expert.

And the book is no longer just a book: it is experience, a means of getting to know yourself and others, a sound way of strengthening the bonds of friendship and cooperation between people.

The principle is all in a sentence of his own, and it is technical, not poetic: «understanding a text passes through play and movement, and it reaches movement memory — which is the memory that stays longest».

That is why the volume has this structure: a child who has acted out a story through play will remember it for a long time, and will be able to draw on what was learned in that moment whenever it is most needed in the future.

It is a way of taking reading where the story alone does not reach.

Needless to say, Leggi & Gioca was made to be used in schools. Presented at various events, it was also bought by a primary school teacher from Oristano, favourably impressed by the project it sets out to develop.

As time passes — another teacher is the one who tells them — the publishing house gathers evidence that the volume is used to welcome children who do not yet speak Italian when they join a state comprehensive school: the group forms through play and emotion.

A book made to bring children back to the page found itself acting as a common language in a school.

Didacta is the trade fair for school professionals: an institutional setting, with the sector's leading operators, an event where ministerial bodies meet and compare notes with other institutions and promoters of the most advanced teaching methods. In Firenze, while most of the attention goes to the new digital platforms for teaching, the first book from the publishing house Bookendipity.com is presented, thanks to the cooperation of the national association of pedagogists.

He goes in the years when teaching was rushing towards the screen, distance learning and online games. And he brings a paper book with games to be played in a circle inside it. He calls it, laughing, Bastian Contrariesimo.

«It was a success, and it is our answer to the problem of alienating technology.»

He had already been to the Salone del Libro in Torino the year before, as an author. In 2025 he returns with his own publishing house — the other side of the table — taking part in the Spazio Toscana pavilion, where he presents the same book, showing his commitment and his attention to what may be current and real problems: what he offers is a method of approach, rather than what might look like just a book.

The following year he is there again, in pavilion 2, at stand M146, with the support of the Regione Toscana (the Tuscan regional government) towards his participation.

And the other half of the catalogue comes out under the same business. Il vento della memoria is a non-fiction novel about asbestos. 1938 deals with the racial laws from inside people's homes. Paradigma and Un lavoro da sogno look at work today from two opposite angles, occupational illness included. And in Gialloteca there is Il falegname, which begins with tools stolen from an artisan's workshop and goes on to face the frailties of the human spirit, both in those who suffer them and in those called upon to investigate.

In April 2026 he takes over a hundred books to the paediatric ward of the Misericordia hospital in Grosseto, through ABIO. They do not end up on a shelf: they end up inside the little backpacks given to children when they are admitted to the ward. Companions in growing up, the article reporting it calls them.

It is the phrase from which the stories, the games and in all likelihood the whole business are born.

A great deal of time has passed since he was a boy already dreaming of carrying out important projects. And yet, if you hear him speak, the original enthusiasm that led him to measure himself against some of the best in the field has not faded at all.

«I have had the good fortune to talk with many well-known and established writers», he admits, «but I know you can learn just as much from everything you have come across. Often it is enough to have an open mind and an attentive eye, one that can look beyond masks and appearances to see the beauty of things».

In the end, he is convinced that he came to found a publishing house through a well-defined path in his own experience, which called him to do it.

Thirty-four traditional titles by a range of selected authors, an area of interest crossing at least seven municipalities within a twenty-five kilometre radius, an attention to education and training in schools, a hundred small books donated to a hospital's paediatric ward, stationery kits for writing, small posters to decorate your own room. These are what the publishing house offers, seeking to make all its readers think and feel, whatever their age.