One thing is certain this summer: hundreds of thousands of people in Italy will be finding a shady spot in which to leaf through the pages of La Settimana Enigmistica, pencil at the ready. Loosely translated as “The Week of Puzzles”, the magazine has been publishing weekly since 1932, minus two short interludes during the Second World War. Hitting shelves every week, it features crosswords, jokes, cartoons, spot-the-difference puzzles and rebuses – a game involving finding a phrase or word from a combination of letters and images – that have made it a household staple.
“Summer for a large part of Italians is about being under the beach umbrella with La Settimana Enigmistica,” says Alessandro Bartezzaghi, who has worked for the publication since 1982 and became its editor in June 2022. “It’s the same for young people, who see it as a way of socialising, with one person suggesting a solution and another something else. I always say that our magazine is for the solitary in winter and for the social in summer.”
It’s aperitivo time in Milan and Bartezzaghi is sitting in front of an alcohol-free fruit cocktail. Getting him to sit down with Monocle feels like a coup, given that he rarely gives interviews and the publisher, Bresi, is by Bartezzaghi’s own admission “reserved” when it comes to making public statements. Which is why we meet in a bar after work rather than at the offices a short walk away in Piazza Cinque Giornate, the publication’s home for more than 90 years. “Our effort has been to adapt [to the times] without exaggerating,” says Bartezzaghi. “Meaning that even if you knew about certain linguistic novelties, you’d introduce them slowly.” He talks about needing to have “one’s feet in two shoes” – ensuring that the magazine’s reassuringly consistent visual identity isn’t meddled with too much, while also guaranteeing that a 30-year-old solving the publication’s puzzles “doesn’t feel disorientated”.
Bartezzaghi refers to La Settimana Enigmistica as a family affair and it really is exactly that. His father, Piero, was involved with the magazine for a long time and built a fiercely loyal fanbase. He submitted a crossword at the age of 15, remaining a collaborator until in 1960 – a year after his son was born. Bartezzaghi Snr was then asked to join the editorial staff to help support a jump in pagination. He remained there until his death in 1989.
“I’ve been breathing La Settimana Enigmistica since I was one year old,” says Bartezzaghi. “There was a big room in the office where women worked looking after the archive. They’d sit me on top of a pile of phone books in a chair and have me bash away on the typewriter.” His father was famed for difficult crossword puzzles under the pseudonym Zanzibar. His son has adopted the name Zanzara, or mosquito, for his most stinging contributions. The magazine has been entirely advert-free since the 1960s, surviving and thriving on subscriptions and newsstand sales. All of the weekly prizes the publication gives away have been bought rather than gifted to it. “Because we want to be independent from everything and everyone,” Bartezzaghi says. “Which is why for a period we were careful to not insert words into crosswords that might seem like advertising, such as Coca-Cola or Fiat. Now the world we live in is so full of brands that we use them.”
Because the magazine doesn’t have commercial commitments, it has no obligation to report how many copies it sells, though it is known to generate revenues of about €50m a year. When Monocle speculates that weekly sales might be anything from 500,000 to two million, it provokes a chuckle. “In the 1980s and 1990s, we hit more than a million copies a week during the summer,” says Bartezzaghi. While he acknowledges that the audience might not be as captive as it once was, the fact that a printed puzzle magazine can sell six figures per week is still impressive. “Even young people want it on paper,” he says.
A quick glance at a Milanese newsstand reveals plenty of pretenders to the quiz-magazine crown. So what makes the 94-year-old publication, to borrow one of its taglines, “the quiz magazine first for foundation and circulation”? Bartezzaghi points to several factors, including being the original title in the field and the investment in quality that leading the sales charts has allowed – from the talent putting together the 150 to 160 games that pack every issue to the ink and paper used.
Alongside what Bartezzaghi sees as a superior product is what he calls the “spectacular planning” that goes into making the magazine. “You can’t put something that is incorrect,” he says. “If you betray the faith of people, they’ll stop playing.” The magazine works so far in advance that when the team goes away for the Italian summer shutdown, it will have already closed its mid-November issues. Each edition goes through fact-checking that includes drafts and three rounds of corrections. There will also be people who are tasked with solving the entire magazine.
Bartezzaghi compares his role to clearing a way through a jungle, machete in hand, as others follow. “There’s a job of shaping and refining the magazine,” he says. “To such an extent that it almost seems like the whole thing has been written by the same person.” So, this summer, Italians will hardly perceive any changes from one issue to the next.
‘La Settimana Enigmistica’ fact file
1. The first actor to be featured on the cover was Mexican Lupe Vélez, on the debut publication, dated 23 January 1932.
2. The magazine was forced to pause printing on two occasions during the Second World War: for a week during a bombing of Milan in 1943 and for three months during Italy’s liberation from fascism in 1945.
3. The magazine has only had four editors in its history.
4. Alessandro Bartezzaghi’s father, Piero, died in 1989 but had enough of a crossword backlog that his work continued to be published in the magazine until the following year. After that, different authors have taken on the most difficult crossword in the magazine on rotation – something that was previously Bartezzaghi Snr’s sole territory.
5. The holiday special, La Vacanza Enigmistica (pictured, above), which costs €5, features more colour pages than the regular magazine and more games aimed at all ages and abilities.
