There are still too few libraries, especially in certain regions. But the worrying thing is that the number of those who attend books also drops. Fortunately, not among the youngest.
Those who do not read live a single life. Those who read can live many more. This idea has been called and repeated several times by Umberto Eco. And it is full of wisdom and truth. Those who do not read, except for his imagination and his reasoning, does not come out of the world around him, who reads breaks through the barriers of this world to enter dimensions that complete and add to his person important parts: they are related to the imagination, whether they are related to reason, whether related to culture in general and the information of present and past facts. Reading opens the mind, keeps it open, keeps it alert and makes her participate in the creativity of what it reads, collaborating in developing her creativity. It is not excluded that all this happens in people who do not read but is certainly rarer and much more difficult.
Istat’s annual survey tells us that the number of libraries registered in 2022 is equal to 8,131, compared to 9.2 million boys and girls. The share varies from region to region: it exceeds 30.8 structures every ten thousand minors in Valle d’Aosta, while in Trentino-Alto Adige it stands at 21.9. In Puglia we have 4.8 active structures every 10,000 residents under the age of 18, and Sicily has the sad record of 5.2. Now, the share of the population that has read at least one book, according to the data of the end of last year, reaches a racing 39.3 percent, falling, even if slightly, compared to 40.8 percent in 2021. Fortunately the share of readers between children and teenage indicates a different trend: with an increase of over 2 points between six and 14 years and a substantial stability between 15 and 17 years old.
Precisely for this reason it would be important that there were more libraries And above all conceived and built precisely thinking of the young bands of the population. In fact, it is in that age that you get the habit of reading and it is at that age – adolescence and youth – in which the mind in turmoil willingly opens up to worlds other than the material and sometimes the flight through reading stands out. More difficult to start reading from adults, albeit possible and in any case desirable. A young man who reads will become a more responsible citizen and less subjected to the fandonies of the power on duty. A young man who reads will become a citizen who cannot be told everything and the opposite of everything, because he will have the tools to filter what is communicated to him and decide independently what to think. In the world of the Internet this is even more necessary, indeed it is urgent, because reading a book is not the equivalent to inquire about the web. It is not because, generally, the book requires greater application, it is not because reading on a paper volume, according to various studies, promotes learning and memorization rather than reading on the net.
Of course, much also depends on families. Because while one child out of three laws in families where parents do not do it, the children of people accustomed to books with constancy read more, the share rises to three out of four. The detachment is clear, but also for this the libraries are needed, since not in all the houses there are books. It is a sad, but not uncommon, experience, to enter houses where there is everything of all the books or, perhaps, in homes of wealthy that cannot be able to allow not to exhibit unrelated volumes they buy them at meters often supplied directly by the furniture stores.
In similar houses a child or young man who reads is a hero. Parents little more than imbecile. A research by Openpolis tells us that the national average of children aged between 16 and 17 who have the habit of reading is 52.4 percent (data detected in the period 2022-2023). Only seven regions record data lower than this percentage, with the lowest level in Sicily (29 percent) and the highest one recorded in the autonomous province of Trento (72.6 percent). This picture of the situation argues alarm, especially for what we have written above about the role that reading can play in the formation of responsible citizens. A woman and a man who read are freer than those who do not touch a page because freedom consists in the choice and choice of the law is increasingly informed, and therefore mature, of those who do not do it.
