A Bookshop in Honor of C.S. Lewis

And the little Italian town that inspired a world

Narni. I paused, my finger hovering over the map. Narni? As in . . . Narnia?

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.

Of course we went.

Part of me was sure I’d be disappointed. How often does the fulfillment of childhood hopes really live up to them?

Nearly never.

But every once in an enchanted while, reality exceeds the dream.

Narni is a place like that. It feels straight out of a fairytale: a hill town in Umbria where magic hovers in the corner of your eye. On that summer day in 2022, while cats stretched themselves in sunny nooks and everything human seemed asleep, I fell in love.

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.

For his part, Lewis never made it to see the real place he’d turned into a fairytale. But if he had, I like to think he would have recognized it.

Coming in through the ancient Ternana Gate, it’s easy to think you’ve walked straight into Narnia. To the northeast, the town looks out on the fertile plains of Umbria. West, a steep, wooded hill leads down to the Nera River, with the old Roman shipyards and Augustus Bridge. If you wind your way south up through the streets, you’ll reach La Rocca, a Medieval fortress with panoramic views.

Narni is a jewel on a hill.

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. And that little part of me held its breath every time I stepped through a likely portal.

Now here I was, in Narni.

As I wandered the cobblestone streets, how could I help daydreaming just a bit? Already, this lovely town had captured my heart. What would it be like to never leave?

In the main piazza, next to the fountain, I sat down at a round table for a perfect Italian cappuccino. The coffee was good, the view was better. My eyes were drowsy from the heat. If I could live anywhere, it would be here. If I could do anything, what would it be?

It didn’t take me long to answer that: I’d be a bookseller, of course. If I could do anything, I’d open a bookshop of my own, right in this very town.

It was just a dream, a little fantasy entertained on holiday. At least, that’s how it started. But I went home, and started looking at real estate listings in Narni. Not so expensive, I saw, to my surprise. Plenty of old, empty stone houses, as in so many small towns in Italy.

I kept searching, and two years later, I found it. The house. On the most picturesque street in town, halfway between the piazza where I had coffee and the fortress on the hill. I’d walked up that very street with my little dog two years before, barely daring to think I could live there one day.

The house I found wasn’t big, or grand. But it had odd little corners and wooden shutters and the most perfect Medieval tower. Best of all, under the front staircase was a green metal door that opened into a stone-arched cellar with soaring ceilings. Another portal. And the perfect place for a bookshop.

A few months later, my husband and I went back to Narni, this time to buy our house! That’s me on the front steps with the keys, a little bit closer to my dream: opening The Wardrobe, a bookshop tribute to C.S. Lewis.

There’s so much work left to be done: sweeping away cobwebs, tiling the floor, painting walls, building bookshelves. It’s happening in fits and starts, since I don’t (yet) live full time in Narni. But little by little, I’m bringing this dream to life. Perusing flea markets for furniture. Collecting books. And dreaming along with kindred spirits who love bookshops and Italy and eccentric little quests to bring more beauty to the world.

Because a dream shared is a dream one step closer to coming true.

I like to think this bookshop dream is a little like that one time C.S. Lewis saw a name on a map and imagined a whole world.

- Sarah Bringhurst Familia is the writer behind Escape to the Bookshop! Where you can follow her incredible journey of opening a bookshop in Narni!