Over forty years, Ombre e Luci has published 160 issues: 4,500 articles, letters, and reviews; roughly 500 authors—most of them parents of people with intellectual disabilities; about 200 testimonies from people with disabilities themselves. The rest is woven together from stories by other family members, friends, professionals, and organizations who saw an opportunity to engage with a world that, until quite recently, struggled to escape the social isolation imposed by a supposedly inevitable destiny: unhappiness.
For us, this has become a genuine extended family, glimpsed in part in our special Open Dialogue pages. For those unfamiliar with our origins, this issue retraces the steps of "an ambitious, daring project that answers the spoken and unspoken hopes of many people still living in isolation"—words written in the final issue of the mimeographed Insieme in 1981, announcing the new venture under the name Ombre e Luci.
We dare to believe such a project still matters, even though, to be honest, it doesn't fit neatly into today's marketplace. Our articles offer no quick answers, no generalizable solutions. We reject spectacle, sentimentality, heroics, and jargon. We let current events pass us by, at least for a while. Utterly unmarketable.
So what drives us? We hold fast to something Manuela Bartesaghi captured in an essay on our website, describing Insieme as a publication "of stories, concrete things, of saying 'it is possible' where fear and prejudice around disability had stolen people's courage to take the next step." That courage has lived on, especially through Mariangela Bertolini's work, ensuring that this prophetic vision of possibility—tested and lived—could reach more and more people. Is it too much to ask that we continue on this path?
Cristina Tersigni, 2023