These eight small stories are offered to you as a measure of light—after this year's relentless rains, after the earthquake's devastation, after the many sorrows that weigh on our lives.
They are personal stories. True stories. Lived with commitment and tenacity, with courage, with eyes fixed on a distant goal. Nothing spectacularly unusual; and yet, if you read them with care—if you look at what lies beneath—they show us something vital: how beautiful it is to reach the summit of a mountain.
When disability marks you from birth, when it is grave or moderate, you carry with you for years a bitter certainty of renunciation. "This I will never be able to do. For my child, this is impossible. He will never be able to…"
And then something shifts. You find companions for the journey. You meet people who made it, who dared and succeeded. You meet those ready to pull you out of depression's black hole; those willing to help you past your fear.
A dream begins to take shape. Something that seems impossible. That "I wish so much that…" you don't even dare say aloud, afraid of being silenced by the crushing words: "Are you mad? What are you thinking?"
Step by step—the way all difficult climbs are made—you begin to plan. You organize. You smile, looking toward that point on the horizon that seems distant but has become real, something you actually want to reach.
Read with curiosity and openness the small stories of Fatima, Giulia, Cristina, André, Cerrie, Dimitri, and the Roman pilgrims. And I hope you will catch their courage—and the courage of those who walked beside them—so that this summer, you too might set out toward a point that seems unreachable but is not.
Mariangela Bertolini, 2009