“Giovanni Negro is the oldest knife grinder in Florence. He has learned his trade from his dad in Friuli. When he was a child, he used to accompany him around the country, sharpening knives and other cutting tools. His shop, on street via dell’Angolo 15, has stayed the same from 1959. On the walls there are the shelves where he puts the sharpened knives, but there is also a wooden frame with a lot of hooks where the scissors are placed before being returned to their owners. The old housewives of the neighbourhood remember when, before setting up shop, he used to cycle around the streets of the city to sharpen the knives of some occasional clients.”

This short excerpt from an interview to Giovanni Negro Tonda (1924 – 1992) written by Caterina Cantoni was published in the Florentine daily newspaper “La Nazione”, and sums up the many stories of the knife grinders in that period. The author explains the difficulties that the knife grinders faced when trying to set up shop in Italian cities.

After the Second World War, after all that wandering around the various regions of the peninsula, many knife grinders settled in one place, were reached there by their families, and opened workshops equipped with traction motors that improved the sharpening.  

Some of them expanded their activities by selling cutting tools.   Thus their work, that used to be temporary, became definitely stable, as with the opening of the shops there was no need to periodically go back to Resia for rural work and family bonds. The knife grinders and their families, and more generally those who left Resia out of choice or necessity, have since then come back to the valley only for brief periods during the holidays.