According to the Italian Constitution, rights and duties recognize no distinction of sex, religion, political affiliation, or social condition. Those who imagined and fought to place these fixed and far-sighted principles at the foundation of our shared civic life knew that they were charting a course for all people. Knowing how profoundly different we are from one another, they understood that everyone needed firm ground on which to exercise their full right—and duty—of citizenship. Holding fast to this principle and trying to make it real in the world of culture, we created the Readers on Equal Terms project. We submitted it to a public funding competition from the Puglia region—one that supported festivals, performances, and cultural activities with inclusion as the goal—we won, and we began to carry it out. Our vision was cultural welfare that would flip the script entirely and place difference at the heart of every cultural policy as a tool for including everyone.
I'm a publisher by trade. Which means I publish books. The publishing house I run, Edizioni La Meridiana, was founded in the late 1980s in a corner of Italy—Puglia—in a small part of the province of Bari. We grew up in the wake of a forward-thinking bishop, don Tonino Bello, who taught us to work toward an idea: that the Good Samaritan we should follow is the one of the present moment—the one who acts socially and culturally to remove the conditions of social fracture, permanent hardship, and inequality between people. Removal: according to the Constitution, the State must remove the conditions that create inequality. In those years, we came to understand that culture too has this task—to carry out this removal. And that doing so is the responsibility of every citizen as part of the community we call the State.
For several years now, our catalog has focused on accessible reading and books. We began with the Parimenti… proprio perché cresco series, publishing classics (The Diary of Anne Frank, Dracula, Jack Frost and Other Stories, Said Loved the Sea, and coming soon The Christmas Story) using symbol-based translation, following the Inbook model.
See also: How Much Can Grow Around a Book
Publishing, for us, also means helping readers find the book. Over the years we've learned that the publishing system is built for product consumption, not for the idea that books and reading are a common good. When it comes to accessible books and getting them into the market, the whole supply chain operates a kind of apartheid. To bookstores, accessible books are a genre that doesn't sell. Culture sections treat them as niche products, meant for audiences that don't generate mass attention.
Keeping the book at the center of cultural promotion means accepting the logic that culture is a consumer product, not a process of inclusion and citizenship. Flipping that logic—putting the reader at the center instead of the book—was the first step that led us to imagine Readers on Equal Terms. Allowing every person to read means recognizing that each of us can access a text independently in different ways, depending on our physical and mental abilities—if we're only given the chance. Access to reading is democracy in action. It's participation, equal opportunity, and dignity.
The project aims to promote, inspire, and make known quality publishers already committed to publishing accessible books, and to build a strong network of expertise in accessible reading across Puglia—connecting public and private libraries, school libraries, associations, and bookstores. Everyone who wants to read or help others read is invited: children, parents, teachers, booksellers, authors, illustrators, librarians, special education teachers, educators—and also administrators and policymakers. Readers with disabilities are protagonists in equal measure, directly involved in building a project that fits their needs.
The first event of the project, the Readers on Equal Terms Fair, took place in Terlizzi at the Mat Urban Laboratory. Making this space accessible meant going beyond the standard requirements—ramps and slopes—that were installed during renovation. We created signage so deaf and partially sighted people could move independently through the Fair. To make it truly accessible and welcoming, we brought in sign language interpreters and subtitling, and staged theater performances where actors used sign language, simplified dialogue, subtitles, and interacted with the audience—letting people touch them, touch the experience. We reimagined book presentations not as conversations between author and moderator alone, but as events with images, movement, encounter.
We rethought culture so it becomes a process that activates people, making them agents of change. If how we see the world depends on how we look at the world, then imagining, understanding, and experiencing that some people see the world with different senses—that changes everything about how we work and makes us better.
A year ago, Readers on Equal Terms was just an application form. Today it's already a process underway that we can tell through videos, pages, and materials we're gathering—and through a training program that has begun and will reach parents, teachers, and decision-makers. It's a process in which, as a publisher, we've chosen to include and make space for organizations already building paths of inclusion around their own experiences of difference.
