Supported by Settore Biblioteche e Welfare Culturale which manages and coordinates the city’s libraries. The edition is co-organized by the Topipittori publishing house and the Hamelin association with the collaboration of the Bologna International Children’s Book Fair and the Boom! Crescere nei libri.
Since September 2023, L’occhio del mondo has ensured the training of librarians in the Bologna network, the adoption by the 11 libraries of the project’s publishing houses and the organization of an exhibition dedicated to their history and the illustrations of their books.
From October 2023 to January 2024, librarians have participated in four training days with artists and experts, with the aim of offering quality workshops to primary school students in Bologna during the year 2024. The libraries involved a total of around thirty classes, or more than 500 children. The libraries have also offered free workshops for children and their parents.
On April 7, 2024, a day of professional meetings, where the questions of the use of illustrated books in schools and other issues related to independent publishing were addressed.
From April to May 2024, an exhibition of original illustrations has been presented at the Salaborsa library in the center of Bologna, highlighting the artists and editorial choices of the participants of L’occhio del mundo, and workshops for children were scheduled.
Follow us
A small illustrated book publishing house, like Topipittori, is a bit like a small coastal boat: it does not carry large cargoes or travel along major trade routes, but it moves at its own speed, sometimes close to the coast, sometimes where there is nothing but water all around. It stops at many ports, but only for a short time, just long enough to unload something and load something else.
In our ports, we load people, ideas and projects; and unload books. In our way, we bring together very different and distant regions of the world. Proceeding over short distances does not mean that we simply stroll around our home: our itineraries have taken us, in fifteen years of navigation, to navigate domestic and exotic seas, calm and stormy waters, along known and unknown coasts.
Italian, French, Polish, Croatian, Iranian, Japanese, Swiss, Bulgarian, Korean, Colombian and Spanish authors and illustrators have embarked on our ship. And our books have landed in many countries: from Thailand to the United States; from Argentina to Sweden; from China to Holland; from Russia to France.
We see ourselves a bit like the Venetian merchants, who left for distant lands to exchange what they had for what they did not have and, sometimes, did not even know existed. They left, travelled, came back. Through this coming and going, they made the world smaller and at the same time larger, people closer and friendlier.
Hamelin is an association dedicated to reading education.
All our activities are based on children’s literature, comics and illustration, based on a guiding principle: reading is a fundamental aesthetic act for finding meaning in oneself and in the world.
We work throughout Italy with children, adolescents and adults who interact with each other at school, in the library and in educational spaces.