In the Centro Abi (Anziani e bambini insieme - Elderly and children together) where 80 elders live, finds its space also a nursery with 40 children, from three months to three years old, sharing many public areas.
It's called "intergenerational learning": in the same facility, meet and play together children and elders, spending time between fairy tales, gardening, and cooking classes.
Active since 2009, Centro Abi is a social, cultural and educational meeting place; it's a place to exchange experiences, where the elderly are able to offer society - and new generations growing - their skills.
It is - by now - the only project of this kind in Italy, but similar experiences are active in France and, above all, in Seattle, at the "Providence Mount St. Vincent - Intergenerational Learning Center", the first nursery school to be situated in a retirement home, that became famous around the world with the documentary "Present Perfect".
Thinking about intergenerational actions is a way to enhance the life conceiving it as an arc, an existential continuum in which every fragment of life is intended "in the making" and takes on a value intrinsically linked to the moments that preceded it as to those who will follow it.
The between-generation dialogue is dialogue between times.
Time is tolerance,
respect, slowness ...
future and waiting.