La Mantia tells children about migrations in ‘The inverted mountain’

“When I was asked to talk about migration, I immediately thought that a ‘reversal of perspective’ was necessary to make children understand how important the concepts of welcome, integration and equity were”. Francesca La Mantia tells the guiding thought of her new book ‘The inverted mountain: migrations narrated to children’, published by Gribaudo. Third in the series ‘The story told to children’, strongly desired by the author herself, the book is part of a series of illustrated volumes that delicately address important and extremely current issues, to allow children to understand them in the way that suits them best.

In fact, the book tells the story of Nonna Caterina who, living in Belgium for sixty years, takes her grandson Rocco to visit the places of her childhood, on the Majella, in Abruzzo. While Rocco discovers breathtaking views, for Caterina this journey has the flavor of reconciliation with the past; a hard past, marked by the emigration of his family to Belgium, where postwar Italy sent 64,000 men to work in the coal mines, promising the mirage of a brighter future. Instead, Catherine’s family in Belgium found tragedy when a fire broke out in the Marcinelle mine on August 8, 1956, killing 275 men, including her father. An intense, delicate and moving story about the Marcinelle disaster, to talk about when entire communities of Italians migrated to a foreign land in search of work and a better future, often to be paid at a high price. “Italy, even if in other forms, still remains today a people of migrants and only by focusing on ‘we’ being ‘the different’ can we better understand the other, their difficulties, the forms of racism, the slogans easy to use that at the same time are violence on the skin of those who suffer them – observes La Mantia – Like many Italians over the centuries have emigrated in search of a hot meal, a roof under their heads, a job and a better life, so in recent years our country has become the destination to escape from hunger, war, famine and drought. It is not easy for anyone to leave their home and risk their lives, but sometimes it remains the only one possibility and you see it in the eyes of parents who face the sea, in those who today in Kabul pass their children over the wall knowing they will never see them again, and in every father who tries to transform obstacles, like a mine, into a mountain upside down, where at the end of the tunnel, everyone can a to ignite the hope of a star “. ‘La montana capovolta’ contains illustrations by Cinzia Battistel and is dedicated to all the children who died in the Mediterranean Sea, to women and men with their suitcases made of dreams and cardboard and to the author’s father who transformed every obstacle into an upside-down mountain.