Monday 7th of December JUMP continue the online meetings started in August with the association SmartLab Europe, situated in Pascara, the Capital of Abruzzo region in Italy. I met the President, Mrs Annarita Bini, a long long time ago while I was working for the European Commission and the Italian Office of the European Parliament and I was in charge of teacher training at the national level. She has always been working on European topics and as a great school director she runs schools and had a prestigious role at the Regional Authority in Abruzzo.
After 15 years we are still here cooperating and learning more and more important competences.
SmartLab Europe is an association created by Annarita after her retirement aimed at the involvement of adult learners in being agents of change. The main mission is activate readers and support reading in Europe, increasing the number of readers at the EU level. JUMP is partner of the EU-READ&ART and one of our goals is to involve associated partners who can be “stakeholders”. SmartLab Europe is an important stakeholder because they are readers, passionate readers, cultured people and motivated to learn and contribute to a better Europe. Both associations follow projects in the field of education and culture and support each other. They are partners and friends. JUMP is tutoring the members of SmartLab Europe in the creation of book trailers.
When we organized this meeting in December they proposed a book we didn’t know, which is recent: “The library on the hill” of Alba Donati. A lovely discovery.
I confess I didn’t have time to read it. Reading is an intimate and subjective activity that a person does when she/he wants. Of course, if in group, the better is. Not everyone feel to share time and passion with others. It’s a matter of empathy. SmartLab Europe are people who will to share and they do it regularly for years now. Monthly reading labs with a book read by everyone.
I love reading labs, don’t misunderstand me. I simply didn’t have time to read it now but I will. The book is really to be discovered! Here what Einaudi Publisher published about it at the link https://www.einaudi.it/catalogo-libri/narrativa-italiana/narrativa-italiana-contemporanea/la-libreria-sulla-collina-alba-donati-9788806253820/
The book of Alba Donati: “Why did you open a bookshop in an unknown village? Because I needed to breathe, because I was an unhappy child, because I was an inquisitive child, out of love for my father, because the world is falling apart, because the reader should not be betrayed, because we must think of the little ones, because I saved myself".
It is never too late to realise a dream. In December 2019, Alba Donati decided to change her life and open a bookstore in Lucignana, a few houses in the Apennines of Lucca. She does this thanks to crowdfunding and word of mouth on social networks. Immediately the bookshop, a sort of ‘literary cottage’ surrounded by greenery, became a place of pilgrimage, of shared words, of special encounters. In this diary that spans six months of the bookshop’s life – the fire that destroys it a month after opening, the energy of the people who get it back on its feet, the closure during the lockdown, up to the organisation of a literary festival – there is the story of a passion that is a lever to lift the world. With lightness and intelligence, Alba Donati gives the reader an experience that is perfectly in line with the mission of her bookshop: to pause the frenzy of our days, to let oneself be lulled by the comfort of small gestures of care, to follow the thread that links book to book, to feel part of a community. Being a bookseller today also means contriving to make ends meet, reading at night, thinking of the space as a refuge and a cultural garrison, collecting orders at the end of the day like pebbles showing the way. And in this life as a happy and resistant bookseller, in her sense of ‘home’, in her choices against the tide, in the story of her family of die-hards, there is all the stubbornness of which women are capable, and at the same time the love for stories, that of those who want to make them known and circulate. This is the book all readers dream of: the pages we read mingle with what happens to us like in a big open diorama, because the words of books are part of our alphabet.
Here the book trailer we realized in english version. One of the difficulties of this project is in fact the language. Not everyone can read and create book trailers in English. This project helps to improve English for those who wants and need it.
Author: Erika Gerardini, JUMP Team
