What it is about
It is neither a museum guide nor a chronology of missions, but a slow walk among the relics of the Italian Red Cross Museum in Campomorone, to give back to readers the people who used, wore and kept those objects. A worn uniform, a wooden stretcher, a yellowed letter: each is «a fragment of biography that has survived time».
The two parts of the book
Silent stories
Five chapters by theme: objects that speak, voices from the front, hands that heal, memory and identity, the thread linking past and present. Reflections on memory are woven with the author's experience as an officer of the Military Corps and a volunteer in the field.
The Museum in Campomorone
The museum's story, told mainly by its founder Giuseppe Pittaluga: from the attic reached only through a trapdoor, where in 1981 «a small exhibition of old things» was born, to the opening on 22 November 1986, the historic vehicles and the thirtieth anniversary.
«Hands that heal don't make the news, but they are what holds everything else together.»
Who it is for
For Red Cross volunteers and military personnel, for teachers who want to bring their classes to Campomorone, and for anyone who believes that memory, to be useful, must have a face.
With the collaboration of Michele Costella, who digitised and processed the documentation to make it easy to consult, and the advice and testimony of Giuseppe Pittaluga, founder and director of the museum.