At the headquarters of Pathological Addictions Department (DDP) of the ASL of Taranto, in via Ancona, a simple but exciting ceremony took place for the delivery of 420 volumes of Italian and foreign literature to the libraries of some socio-health and socio-educational structures in the city. The initiative with the significant name “Reading creates dependence…from thinking” intends to underline how important it is, in recovery paths, to combine therapeutic and social interventions with opportunities to encounter beauty, expressed through all artistic forms. Reading more is like living more and more consciously. Just as the great publisher Valentino Bompiani stated: “a man who reads is worth two”.
The books come from the doctor’s personal library Annapaola Petrone Albanese who wanted to donate it – through the doctor Anna Paola Lacatena, sociologist of the DDP with whom she has carried out other significant initiatives – to the guests of the socio-educational day center for minors at risk Amida of Taranto and the Therapeutic Community-Female Association headquarters Heron Onlus Taranto. Part of the volumes will also enrich the library of the Pathological Addictions Department of the Taranto Local Health Authority, open not only to patients but to all citizens.
During the meeting the doctor Albanian Petrone he gave a short but intense speech on the importance of books and reading. A truly “magistralis” “lectio”, an absolutely new testimony, here is a small initial part: “It is I who thank you, I do not consider myself to have given a gift but to have received it, to make my books continue to live, books that have kept me company for many afternoons, for many days of my life, I consider them my “book friends” and it is with this state of mind, truly of passing friendship, passing words to read and stop at, that I pass them on to you, with great transport as well as with that sense of gift that characterizes me because I think that being with others also means clarifying one’s position in the world, one’s availability, one’s openness and therefore demonstrating with one’s clear, open, sincere, simple, obvious gesture what one is, how one is. I assure you that culture is not enough, the book is not enough, the chair is not enough, the conference is not enough, the expressions that can even sometimes lead elsewhere are not enough, but to certain gestures, this of the books that pass from me to you… also a conduit. Stories, novels and short stories have the right to emerge from silence because they have tasks and the first is to propose the opening of a dialogue in the reader. There is a moment when you close the book, keep track of the page you are reading and then sit down, reflect. And you are reading a story, a story about someone else but it is the only person you don’t see, that you don’t know, that you don’t know, that doesn’t exist, that tells you: one moment there is a real, concrete, imaginative human story which can also concern you.”
“And the book suggests human events, a variety of events that have occurred, narrated that open up glimpses and this is the first moment of knowing a book – continues Dr. Petrone Albanese – and I have asked myself many times the difference between a book as I have it and a book made digitally. Don’t take the page away from me, don’t take away the pleasure of going back to a sentence, maybe I didn’t understand it, maybe I still need to read it, to go back to it, to mark it. Knowledge is therefore one of the greatest aspects – in my opinion – because it is direct between the reader and the book. The book, this simple object waiting for you where you placed it. When you come back after work this evening and pick up the page where you left it. Because you had something more urgent to do, but there is a corner of yours that belongs to you.”
The initiative “Reading creates dependence… from thinking” is included in the national campaign “The May of Books” now in its fourteenth edition and entitled “If you read you’ll lib(e)ri”. Promoted by the Ministry of Culture and the Center for Books and Reading. This campaign invites us to bring books and reading to contexts other than traditional ones, “to intercept those who usually don’t read but who may be intrigued if stimulated in the right way”.
The ceremony was sponsored by the Director General of the Local Health Authority of Taranto, Dr Vito Gregorio Colacicco , and was chaired and coordinated by the Director of the Pathological Addictions Department, Dr Vincenza Ariano. Among the public were also representatives of the organizations benefiting from the donation.
Sociologist, literature professor and cultural spokesperson, Annapaola Petrone Albanese is a well-known scholar and cultural operator from the city of Taranto. Founder and former president of the Association Friends of the museums of Tarantowas the first president of the city section of Soroptmist international. Furthermore, he is already an honorary councilor of the minors section of the Court of Appeal of the Court of Lecce in Taranto.
