#ioleggoperché is back and going from strength to strength; it now involves nurseries too

#ioleggoperché, the initiative by the Italian Publishers’ Association to donate books to schools, is back and going from strength to strength. Now in its 11th year, it is being extended this year to include nursery schools as well. From 7 to 15 November, there will be 4,135 bookshops where you can go in to choose a book, buy it and donate it to one of the 34,614 participating schools (from primary to secondary) and 4,004 nurseries.

The title of this edition is ‘A Growing Community’. So far, 4.5 million books have been donated and, thanks to the initiative, one in five schools has been able to open a library. “We are announcing a huge book festival,” said AIE President Innocenzo Cipolletta at the launch event at the Tenca High School in Milan, “but we hope that school libraries – in more and more schools – will remain open all year round.” Precisely to help the community grow, the 100,000 books donated by publishers this year are being channelled into the regions where the ‘ioleggoperché’ initiative has had the greatest impact so far: Calabria, Molise and Sardinia. The initiative is supported by the Ministry of Culture through the Centre for Books and Reading, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, the Italian Library Association, the Italian Booksellers’ Association and the Italian Booksellers’ and Stationers’ Union. Thanks to the Cariplo Foundation, the pilot scheme launched in 2022 in 350 nurseries in vulnerable areas of Lombardy and the provinces of Novara and Verbano-Cusio-Ossola is now being rolled out across the whole country, with 4,004 participating nurseries.