Every Italian born after 1961 has, for sure, some childhood memories tied to figurinePanini and their beautiful albums. We’d buy them – or better, beg our parents and grandparents to buy them for us –exchange them with one another to complete our collections and, when only a handful was missing to reach the goal, we’d order them directly from Panini, in Modena, filling in that form you’d find at the end of each album: the care and attention we’d put into the task was far superior to anything we needed to do for school, I can guarantee you.

Personally, I was into every collection dedicated to the manga series I’d watch on TV and I was probably completing at least three albums every year. My mother would get me 10 packets of figurine at a time, each of them contained, if I remember well, 5 or 6 of them and cost round 200 lire, for a total of 1000 lire for the lot, the equivalent of today’s 0.60 cents.