I remember the thrill of holding the first issue of Ombre e Luci fresh from the printer. I remember all the work that had gone into choosing the content, selecting articles and photographs. But before that first issue came out, we'd had to handle some crucial preliminaries. Starting with the magazine's title, which had to be officially registered with the court (authorization from the Rome Tribunal, no. 19/83).
Though Ombre e Luci presented itself as the Italian edition of the French Ombres et Lumière (stated plainly in that first editorial), we had a long and spirited debate about how to translate the French title, which set shadows (plural) against light (singular). A literal translation—"Shadows and Light"—was rejected immediately. "Lights and Shadows" flowed better but felt less distinctive. We were also thinking about vocabulary that would speak to all our readers, whatever their background. It was early 1983, a very different era for disability inclusion, yet that same editorial note reveals the care already taken: beside the word "handicapped," the editors wrote: "We regret using this term, now common in Italian, to describe the range of physical or intellectual limitations caused by trauma or illness. How else can we speak without creating confusion?"
I remember our large dining room table buried under proofs, photographs, books, and other magazines—the center of our editorial meetings, which often happened at home rather than downstairs on via Bessarione. What passion, what intelligence, what humor filled those meetings, where Italian and French mingled between heated discussions and laughter; between tea in winter or fruit juice in summer on the garden table. No, I cannot recall those years with any distance.
But when did the magazine really begin? The simplest answer is that Ombre e Luci grew out of Insieme, a mimeographed newsletter that, in an era of landlines and stamped letters, held together our Faith and Light communities. We couldn't use that title for the magazine—by then another publication had claimed it. But I believe Ombre e Luci had deeper, more distant roots. In that first editorial, we stated our wish to "reach the greatest number of people waiting for someone, something to break their isolation: the family in a remote village, the person living in the anonymous outskirts of a city." Break the isolation. And my mind turns back to my own family's story, and others like it. My mother's journey—with help from so many people and from God—from loneliness to proclamation, from desolation to the Magnificat, from phone calls and notes and letters, to a magazine, now also online.
"It's been eight days since her birthday—Franceschina's sixth—and I've been thinking these days about how many evenings, how many nights, how many days of our marriage have been taken up by her presence and her needs. Why has she come to us? Are you signaling something, Lord? Is this a call, a gift from you? I wish I could understand more and know clearly what you expect and want from us, from me. Tonight, when my mind wanders, and my heart is a tangle of conflicting feelings in constant struggle, to know clearly what you want from me." So my mother wrote in her diary on November 18, 1968.
"Then Paolo and I went to Madame Heyndrickx's hotel for our great meeting. Moving, extraordinary (I don't know if you can grasp its full importance). We got to work right away. We'd prepared our whole program already (…). I was saying—I and 'Friquette' (that's Sophie's mother) threw ourselves into it with great energy, and Paolo joined us with a drive and ease we'd never seen. At every meeting, every sick-call Mass, we'd search for children and their parents, give them our leaflet with the schedule of gatherings, talk about what we wanted to do—all with great simplicity and discretion. We had eighty-five sign-ups from families with severely disabled children alone." So my mother wrote to her sisters, not two years later, when she returned from the second pilgrimage to Lourdes (August 30, 1970).
Respect for fragility. The strength and joy of shared life. The courage to seek real solutions. Always starting from lived experience, never grand speeches.
Breaking isolation. Knowing and understanding each other better. Beyond the pages devoted to Faith and Light community life, the magazine offered serious inquiry into many subjects: clinical matters and faith, family and work. Book and film reviews. A steady gaze toward the work of other organizations and initiatives. Forty years have passed. The magazine still thrums with energy, color, ideas—new talents and minds. Much has changed. Much remains. For instance, Ombre e Luci still carries the enormous cost of publishing without a single advertisement, without public subsidy. If not for the near-voluntary labor of most of our editorial team, how many other magazines could have survived on subscriptions and donations alone for so many years?
And the magazine still chooses—in the midst of so much bad news—to discover and tell only positive experiences and initiatives, good news. Certain questions return too: though the magazine is sustained chiefly by subscriptions and is now the official organ of Faith and Light Italy, what percentage of subscribers are members of Faith and Light itself? How many members of Faith and Light actually read Ombre e Luci?
As the world of disability has changed dramatically—from school inclusion to employment—old questions about the magazine's future resurface. Among Ombre e Luci's many strengths, I think we can claim this: it has always tried to attend to the deepest, most important realities of human life. Respect for fragility. The strength and joy of shared life. The courage to seek real solutions. Always starting from lived experience, never grand speeches. In an age of dazzling frivolity and surface noise flooding both print and web, Ombre e Luci remains an uncommon place to pause—to know, to wrestle, to think.
