The Ways of Books

An Italy with two faces. The first of these is characterised by the growing lack of education of our young people (44% of secondary school students do not reach the minimum level in Italian, and 51% fail to do so in mathematics, with even more shocking figures in the South and in low-income families). The second face, meanwhile, is somewhat more encouraging, with the extraordinary increase in reader numbers during the depths of the pandemic and the challenging period of closures and lockdowns (15 million more copies of books were sold in the first half of 2021 than in the previous year, a rise of 44%: "The book is alive and well', enthuses Ricardo Franco Levi, president of AIE, the Italian Publishers' Association). We must maintain this emphasis on books, therefore, not least as a fundamental element in reforming and enhancing the school system. Following "the ways of books", as Marina Roggero, Professor of History at the University of Turin, suggests, in her book on "Reading, language and the public in modern Italy" by Il Mulino publishing house, can help us find the reasons behind the fact that ours was long "a country of few readers" during the lengthy period of illiteracy, a phenomenon that was still clearly evident in the second half of the twentieth century, and "in the chasm between the educated and the semi-literate, created by our beautiful and impossible written language." Le vie dei libri. Letture, lingua e pubblico nell’Italia moderna Marina Roggero Il Mulino, 2021