After two years, Fondazione LIA is finally back in-person with a Reading in the dark. The event was held on the 4^th of December in Rome, in the evocative New Congress Center known as La Nuvola and designed by Massimiliano Fuksas, in the context of the twentieth edition of Più Libri Più Liberi, the fair of Italian small and medium sized publishers organized by the Italian Publishers Association.

Guest of the event was Giulia Caminito, author of the book L’acqua del lago non è mai dolce published by Bompiani, with which the writer was awarded the prestigious Campiello Prize and was among the five finalists of the 2021 Strega Prize.

The event is organised in the framework of Aldus UP, the European Book Fairs network promoting the internationalization of the book sector and the innovation of book fairs format.

Il libro

Antonia’s family moves on the shores of Lake Bracciano. She is a brave mother with a husband with a disability and four children. Antonia is honest and fierce. She believes in the common good and yet she wants to teach her daughter not to expect anything from others. And Gaia learns it. She learns not to complain, to dive into the lake even if the currents drag her to the bottom, to read books and not to watch TV, to hide her mobile phone in a shoebox and her sadness where no one can see it.

Her voice leads us through a youth that bords on tragedy and dreams, asks biting questions. Her friends, her loves, her defiant gaze are destined to remain in our hearts like the mysterious nativity scene at the bottom of the lake.

The e-book version of this volume is also accessible to people with visual disabilities and is listed in the catalogue of accessible books certified by LIA. To find out about its accessibility features, visit the book’s details page.

The Reading in the dark

Through the absence of light, a Reading in the dark cancels any distinction between those who read with their eyes, those with their hands, and those with their ears. Giulia Caminito read excerpts from her novel with Clara Ori revealing diverse ways of reading. Reading aloud, with eyesight or with hands through digital Braille showed the audience the potential of accessible e-books readable also by print impaired persons. The words read, touched, listened become a means to establish new relationships, to experience new forms of learning, to express one’s identity and deepen the discovery of the other.

It was a great pleasure for me, a unique opportunity, a space of intimacy and reflection within the great chaos that the fair can be. It was an honour to restart with LIA after their break from face-to-face events and to do so by reading some passages from my novel, after an intense year of sometimes fleeting promotion.

I realized that I know something about accessibility issues, but also that I want to learn more about it and therefore I hope we will be able to organize a similar reading experience again in the future. The people who attended the Reading in the Dark were very involved and the various types of reading – by voice, through digital Braille or speech synthesis – somehow made my book still new and different.

Giulia Caminito

The event is organized in the framework of Aldus UP, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union