Dear Repubblica, where are you going if you don’t have the Bibliobus
Dismay and melancholy reading Repubblica and the story of the Bibliobus, which goes around villages to bring books where there aren't any. Francis Walsingham's letter
Dear director,
This morning I woke up like this. Polemical. While I sip my coffee and leaf through Repubblica, my eye, or rather my eyes, both, falls on one "article" in particular and I think: then the editors complain that people no longer read the newspapers…
Page 16 of Repubblica . A whole page . “My book ambulance. I wander around the villages and reading becomes therapy." A whole page about a bookseller and writer (and here, for heaven's sake, we don't want to engage in any squalid, leafy controversy à la Antonio Gurrado ) who goes around the villages in a minibus to bring books.
The point, I was saying, is that it is presented as if it were an absolute novelty. Indeed, it is said that no, it is not an absolute novelty, another writer had done it in the early 2000s. In the early 2000s.
But I say… in a former radical chic newspaper of the Italian intelligentsia such as Repubblica , it could also be remembered that the best-known case of Bibliobus in Italy can be traced back in the immediate post-war period to two gentlemen called Luciano Bianciardi and Carlo Cassola – Cassola and Bianciardi, two of the greatest writers of post-war Italy – in the countryside of Grosseto. They did exactly that and there is an extensive literature on all of this. The librarian Elisabetta Francioni dedicated years of study to him. But even the most modest and maligned Wikipedia (which we all go to read, without saying so publicly, so as not to feel so ignorant anymore) dedicated an entry to him , which the editor on duty in the Gedi newspaper directed by Maurizio Molinari could have consulted beforehand. to let out such bestiality.
So, what are we complaining about? If it had been a short paragraph I would have been able to understand it, but in an entire page you cannot say that there is a "grandfather" or a "founder" of this genre – very dignified – when the names of those who made it known correspond to the name of Cassola and Bianciardi.
The problem – perhaps – are those 20 thousand buyers of Repubblica . But what do they know who Bianciardi and Cassola are if they no longer even know Manzoni and Giuseppe Garibaldi? And to think that that very unknown Bianciardi “ believed a lot in the cultural emancipation of our proletariat ”. And here we are not even talking about the proletariat and far be it from us to want to be the Alain Elkann of the moment who calls "landsknechts" young people with tattoos on a regional ticket for Foggia. But if you want to spread culture, at least do it by checking what you write.
Dear director, okay enough controversy. I ditch the coffee and switch to chamomile (but cold) because I think it's better…
Good day,
Francis Walsingham
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/cara-repubblica-ma-dove-vai-se-il-bibliobus-non-ce-lhai/ on Wed, 07 Aug 2024 08:25:05 +0000.