The residents of an old people's home are the authors of this book about lives lived.
A hothouse of memories, but what is the importance of memory? It is knowledge hidden in time and transformed for a posthumous time. A concert of laughter, tears and dormant flavours reawaken with a new awareness.
Existence, which flows at the mercy of events, suddenly becomes a mirror of a new dimension, reborn to bring us back to life and which finally welcomes us.
With its power, memory metabolises suffering and transforms it into teaching.
The voice is broken by emotion, the eyes become moist and it is increasingly difficult to continue reading. Tales bordering on suffering, others bordering on dreams, but all included in the hope of a better life. Dignity sustains and accompanies them, simple and genuine as only real life can be.
On the pages of this book we read the story, in an important project conceived by Dr. Laura Bruno, we discover how the path of awareness of the protagonists becomes a school for the reader who becomes immediately grateful to those shoulders hunched over the paper and the trembling hands that, word after word, harness time and make it a powerful steed capable of leading towards salvation.
Flaviana Fusi
Introduction by the Mayor
There is an African proverb that says: an old man who dies is a library that burns…. And how true these words are!
The elderly are the historical memory, the past, a priceless memory, which must be jealously guarded, protected and passed on to the younger generations. Every community has the ethical and moral duty to recognise the immense value that each 'grandfather' brings with him and to give him an active and proactive role in society.
The elderly have a strategic task as witnesses of knowledge and anecdotes that should be rediscovered and protected because they are full of meaning, as well as being an important reminder for the whole community.
The project raccontarsi… At the centre, therefore, is emblematic of these reflections and demonstrates how important it is to put our elderly people at the centre, to give them a say and listen to what their voice can pass on, knowing that their past, with all its testimonies and stories, can enrich our present and, even more so, give lifeblood to our future,
enrich our present and, even more, give lifeblood to our future.
Dott. Giuseppe Cosola
Sindaco di Adelfia
https://francobagaglia.it