Reading to Read

The Tolomeo Museum with its Atelier is involved in cultural accessibility projects. Its activity does not end with the historical account of the Cavazza Institute’s heritage. The goal is knowledge sharing and this has led it to relate to other city institutions. Museums, archives and libraries are the domain of choice. This passage is the bridge that brought us closer to the LXL project, Leggere per leggere Bologna (reading to read), a project of the Hamelin Association that is based on the need to train professional experts in reading education, a role often linked to spontaneity and voluntary work but fundamental within citizenship. With the Hamelin Association we share a vision that also ties in with our idea of the museum: Reading is not a passive form. It is not just assimilation of things that come to us through listening. 

Reading is a creative act. It feeds our imagination and is an aesthetic act that influences our interpretation of reality. Through reading we allow the development of the imaginative dimension that enhances our personality. Providing this possibility to all means creating the opportunity for an inclusive community, based on the coexistence of differences. The “book in play” project was developed, a project that leads to the construction of dynamic reading moments of illustrated books. Not just reading aloud, but experiences that involve the whole body set in motion in the emotional, cognitive and sensory dimensions. 

The assumption is that vision is not just a competence of sight, but is something pre-existing, much bigger, and deeper. Even those who are blind continue to live and experience with irresistible force that wonderful reciprocal exchange that takes place between the inner world and the outer world, between an outer world view and an inner view. Last October, in partnership with the SCE and its manager Paola Gamberini, we hosted a dynamic reading of the illustrated book La Diga, by David Almond of Edizioni Orecchio Acerbo. A full-day workshop where the structure of the story was reproduced within a theatre that gives a space to the text in its semantic units. At the end, the children constructed their own tactile polymaterial restitution using various materials: the tactile postcard of the dam. The book in play is now on the shelf of the Atelier Tolomeo.

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