Una notte nella casa delle fiabe

As children, we didn’t look for the thrill of the scare in fairy tales, but we wanted to learn to recognise courage, to see intelligence at work, cunning, the luck that helps the bold, who got the better of violence, injustices, arrogance and meanness. We were looking for escape, of course, for entertainment, but also for much more. In these restless years, of adapting to new dimensions and balances, Silvia Ballestra started buying children’s books. She did it to return ‘home’. To poetry, to beauty, to great themes and ideas, to creativity at work, to experimentation, to unexpected outcomes: all things that are increasingly rare to experience. And so the idea of spending a whole night in the house of fairy tales was born. In the dark and alone, Silvia Ballestra ventured into the rooms of the Brothers Grimm, the Grimmwelt in Kassel, Germany. No magic spells were needed. The entire building came to life, with its ghosts, its stories, its voices and above all its words. Because it is precisely words that guide us in a universe populated by women, anonymous and otherwise, writers and oral narrators: their hands and their voices are powerful.