2023-12-01 22:54:12
by IDA BOZZI
With supplement #627 also the special issue dedicated to children, parents and educators
It seems like a strange gothic fairy tale, but it really happened. In 1914, the postal carriage going from Grangeville to Lewiston, in the United States, delivered a rather particular package, with a stamp on the jacket: a five-year-old girl, Charlotte May, sent with postage to her grandmother. A 22 kilo package paid a fare of just 32 cents, says the writer Christian Antonini.
The story of the “freed” little girl, together with many other stories and adventures of (real) letters, postcards, messages on WhatsApp, cards for Santa Claus, can be read in the new issue of “La Lettura delle donne e dei bambini”, which On Saturday 2 December it can be found in the App and on Sunday 3 on newsstands together with the new issue of «la Lettura», #627.
The “Letturina” for children (and for parents, teachers, educators…) is a Christmas number that is almost entirely “epistolary”: in a time in which written communication is back in vogue with text messages and social media, there are many means, ancient, modern, unexpected, to communicate. We know that there is a Santa Claus post office in Lapland and «la Lettura» went to visit it: Alessandra Chiarlo tells it and Walter Menegazzi’s photos show it, all red and equipped with a lounge where Santa Claus receives guests .
The anthropologist Elisabetta Moro explains how the cultural and religious traditions that teach us to communicate with the supernatural were born, retracing the mutation of Saint Nicholas into Coca-Cola’s red Santa Claus or the spread of devotion to Saint Lucia. And the writer Pierdomenico Baccalario recalls JRR Tolkien’s Christmas custom: the author of The Lord of the Rings used to write letters to his children putting himself in the shoes of Santa Claus and many fairy-tale helpers, clumsy bears, gnomes and elves. A journey into the traditions of other cultures is the one proposed by the anthropologist Rossella Galletti, who tells why Indian schoolchildren invoke the deity Sarasvati for a good grade.
Other letters come from the Cpia 1 (Provincial Center for Adult Education) of Bari, a prison location, and from the «Francesco Rucci» prison, also from Bari, born during a program of meetings in prison with some writers: one of the writers engaged in the laboratories, Marco Ponti, tells what happened when the disheartened inmates (“nobody cares about us”) were asked to write a letter to themselves as children. And the letters, which the «Letturina» publishes, are touching.
A classic returns, Peter Pan, which will be a musical directed by Maurizio Colombi on tour in Parma, Milan and other cities until March 14: Laura Zangarini tells what James Matthew Barrie, the character’s father, and Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to each other, in the many letters they exchanged (in volume from 3 January for Lorenzo de’ Medici Press).
There are those who collect them and those who remember having sent many of them. The postcards still exist (even if ten times fewer have been produced since 2000), and there are those who reproduce those old images, as the Litoincisa 87 lithograph in Rimini does, at a rate of three million a year: the writer Angelo tells it Ferracuti. There is also a mail art, the postal art about which the anglist and teacher Laura Scuriatti writes.
Letters have made history: historical epistles, such as that of Ambrose who convinced Emperor Theodosius I the Great to repent of a massacre, are collected by Antonio Carioti; and the famous letters of literature, cinema and art are told by Cristina Taglietti, Stefano Bucci and Cecilia Bressanelli. And then love letters, messages written by the grandmother to Little Red Riding Hood, many original drawings, and Angelo Mozzillo’s map showing the history of the post. In the App, the Theme of the Day, for Saturday 2 December by Matteo Biagi and Marco Magnone, is dedicated to letters in novels for girls and boys.
Above all, we communicate with letters. «La Lettura» of the greats, the new issue #627, also begins with two epistles: two narrators, Sandro Veronesi and Alessandra Sarchi, write to their children (theirs and everyone else’s) to talk to them about the tragedy of feminicides: the reasons and of possible solutions.
In addition to the most recent issue of the Saturday preview supplement and the Theme of the Day, the «la Lettura» App for smartphones and tablets also offers the archive of all issues released since 2011. Subscribing to the App costs 3.99 euros per month or 39.99 per year, with one free week. The subscription can also be subscribed from desktop starting from this page. For subscribers, the contents are also visible from PC and Mac from their Profile page.
December 1, 2023 (modified December 1, 2023 | 9:52 pm)
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