The town hall of Bellano hosted the presentation of two new books by on Friday Andrea Vitali. The evening – as the mayor began Antonio Rusconi – it was also an opportunity to celebrate the Library (located on the ground floor of the building that houses the municipal offices, ed.), which since 2018 has been dedicated to the memory of Antonio Balbiani and which in recent days has reached the number of 16,000 books present in the catalogue. “Every year we insert 1,500 volumes, between purchases and donations” explained the mayor. “The book crossing stations – continued the mayor – are also an important part, spread across the territory, of small libraries, with five stations in the municipal area: 4 in Vendrogno and one at the train station in Bellano”.
Still talking about books, which Andrea Vitali knows well, the municipal administration has a new project, namely to transform the bicycle of the historic municipal “sweeper” Aldo Cariboni, which was used for waste collection, into a mobile book crossing station, obviously modified and restored for the transport of books during events”.
The word then passed to the local librarian Donata Gottifredi, who spoke with Vitali in the presentation of his latest two works. With regard to “Piedivico heirs and family”, present in the lending system, “already has 74 reservations on the site”. “Reading doesn’t save your life, maybe it can change it, improve it or make it heavier, depending on what you have in your hands”, Vitali comments. “Books make life more worth living”. The place where the first book is set is Brescia, a land for which the author has “always felt a certain fascination, where there is a sort of more accentuated freedom of thought than what can be seen here”. “The novel – he explained – is a bitter comedy, a reflection linked to characters who interpret dead people whose fantastic projection has transformed into figures extremely different from them, people who in some cases have never read a book in their life and who have not suffered any negative effects when dealing with life or feeling it.”
The second book presented by the author, “Stories of trains, ministers and soups”, starts from a problem that is increasingly affecting commuters who use rail transport recently, namely train delays. The story is therefore told as “entertainment linked to two experiences that happen and will happen to everyone, things that offer life experiences, such as knowing different and small stations”.
Within the narrative is mixed the feeling of “small jokes towards the railways and then the opportunity to tell the adventures of those who work there like the protagonists of the story, in which the head of the family is also the station master and has his work because the Minister of Transport, obsessed with delays, stops the movement of trains as a paradoxical solution against delays”. Inside the volume, as the title says, the soup is also mentioned, “a prize he receives every evening before the Prime Minister goes to bed, locked in his room playing with a wooden train, always on time”.
At the end of the performance, the mayor recalled a few more numbers of Andrea Vitali’s titles with the books present within the Lecco library system: there are 3,493 for a total of 53,800 loans, with the Lecco structure having 128 copies , while the record for the most loyal readers of the Bellanese author is held by Casatenovo, with over 3,600 loans. The public who attended then enjoyed an aperitif offered directly in the Library by the municipal administration.
