“Tall and narrow pages, a bright yellow color, great simplicity of the lines and words: this is the tactile book Il Girasole. This aesthetic appearance immediately recalls the slender, vivid, sincere traits of the flower who is the main character of this story. An invisible, but perceptible, connection between inside and outside, between form and content. Initially just a seed, gradually at the heart of a little magic trick, we accompany the sunflower since its birth until its final blooming, in a series of steps that combine poetry, learning, and practical experience.

The book is not satisfied with telling the story of the life cycle of the flower; it also has a metaphorical touch, inviting the reader to take part to this natural “dance”, transforming what you just read in a real possibility. Thanks to the seeds hidden at the end of the book, words and pictures will literally come to life in a vase or a garden not made out of paper.
Thanks to this, the reading goes outside the page, IIL GIRASOLE has its roots in a very fertile ground, perhaps still quite unexplored by traditional tactile publishing: the one of games and active involvement of the reader entering a dimension that goes beyond the simple scanning of figures.

But Il Girasole also carries another experiment in the few pages that make up the book, that has to do mostly with the pictures. Firstly, they are realized in such a way that they are significant and readable -- without having to use collages of different materials, but using only a thick cardboard.
Secondly, they recall the distinctive looks of the pictograms used in symbol books. This bridges the different worlds – but all equally inspiring – inside the universe of reading accessibility.”

Elena Corniglia graduated in Italian Literature, Philology and Linguistics and specialized in Children’s Literature. She is the head of Vietato Non Sfogliare, center for the research on accessibile books for children, part of the association Area onlus di Torino. Since 2013 she has been collaborating with LiBeR , a magazine on children’s books, writing articles about the relation between disabilities and children’s literature.