World Book and Copyright Day: the meeting with Luigi Ballerini
On Saturday 23 April on the occasion of World Book and Copyright Day, the San Marino National Commission for UNESCO, in collaboration with the management and teachers of the Middle Schools of the Republic of San Marino, organized a meeting, which was attended remotely by pupils of all classes, with Luigi Ballerini, a children’s writer much appreciated by young people. Doctor and psychoanalyst, Luigi Ballerini lives and works in Milan. He is a member of the Sigmund Freud Friends of Thought Society, founded and chaired by Giacomo Contri, at whose school he trained. He has been dealing with questions relating to childhood and young people for many years, meeting parents, children and teachers in his professional studio as well as at schools and cultural centers. Since 2004 he has been publishing novels and short stories for the youngest and non-fiction texts for adults. He teaches writing classes in schools, from elementary to high school. His works, translated into several languages, have received recognition and prizes in numerous events at national and international level.The meeting, which was connected to the more than one thousand students of the Middle School accompanied by their teachers, began with the brief interventions of the Deputy Director Prof. Magalotti and the President of the UNESCO Commission prof. Monti and continued with the introductory speech by Luigi Ballerini in which he spoke of writing and reading as an act of love for reality and as an active form of discovery and knowledge of oneself and of the world. He also stressed that every meeting with the boys is a moment of great enrichment for him because it offers him the opportunity to get to know his interlocutors, his readers, an opportunity that he does not normally write is presented so easily to whom. He then spoke of reading as the possibility of bridging large distances of time and space, of discovering that even in the most distant texts it is possible to recognize oneself and discover something of oneself because books are eternal. The writer’s words immediately sparked an intense and enthusiastic dialogue. The numerous questions of the students offered Luigi Ballerini the opportunity to deepen the origin of the vocation to writing, the obstacles and difficulties but also the discoveries that accompanied his creative activity, and often were an opportunity to talk about his life experience and attitude that allows you to interpret stories to tell in daily encounters. There were also requests for advice to improve their written production, requests that received very concrete answers. The meeting ended with the heartfelt thanks of Dr. Benedettini, Secretary General of UNESCO, and with a warm applause that also overcame the barrier of the ‘remote’ mode.
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