Page after page

The recent experience of the pandemic hasn't meant stopping meeting people, indeed the life of the Arsenale della Speranza has allowed us to meet so many new people. Like on the occasion of the recording of the 72 episodes of the Good Day podcast in Portuguese, 72 special stories that could speak to the hearts of our friends. In particular, reading a newspaper article, we were struck by the story of Luciene Vignoli Müller, a girl who lived her childhood as a street child and who managed to recover her life thanks to a library that has become the home of she.

It seemed like a fictional story, but, reading the article, we found elements that meant it wasn't a fictional story: this person really existed! We tried Instagram, wrote her a couple of times, got no response. After some time, her answer came, so we started talking to each other, she began to know our story and came to visit us. She fell in love with the Arsenale della Speranza and had two "river" meetings with us in which she told her story with extraordinary intensity. Luciene lived on the streets from four to eleven years old. She had run away from home because her stepmother hated her: one day she even poured boiling oil on her back leaving a heart-shaped scar. She's lived a life that seems surreal, yet - when you hear her tell - all the events fit together perfectly and you understand that it's all true.

An incredible story, a female Forrest Gump. She did everything in her youth, she survived despite being kicked out of every house she tried to enter. One day, however, jumping over a library wall, she found a place from which no one seemed to want to send her away. The library was a public place, and about twenty years ago, when she was a street child, there were no guards for those kinds of buildings. Luciene was there, at night out in the garden of the library, during the day literally living among the colored books that she called "my dolls". She as soon as she could fit into the caravans of children visiting with the school. Meanwhile, the librarians taught her to read. Thus, page after page, she read all the books in the library!

Now Luciene is a very cultured person, she is happily married, she has adopted a child and has transformed her passion for books into real work: she has become a writer and editor. When we publish a new version of our Rule of Yes in Portuguese, we would like to entrust you with the printed edition. It would be wonderful because she is a woman who comes from the street and who loves the Arsenale. She has written a book that is becoming a small best seller entitled Col invisível. The colo – which we can translate as womb / breast – is none other than the mother cradling. And Luciene really saw in our Arsenal an “invisível colo” capable of welcoming so much humanity. For us, Luciene is a little more than a friend: she has listened to Ernesto's Good Day translated into Portuguese so many times that she has made the final greeting her own: when she meets you she always says: «I love you !».


Simone Bernardi
NP May 2023