April 24, 2009
Luoghi comuni/little migrating stories through the city
From May to July 2009, trams, buses, and 16 underground stations across Milan will be dressed with unusual billboards: not ads, but faces and words of first and second generation migrants, who amount to 25% of our daily urban companions.

lettera27 is supporting Luoghi comuni/little migrating stories, an anthology of stories written in many languages by various authors. The anthology combines memories, impressions, intuitions, and meaningful anecdotes collected by a team of psychologists, researchers and journalists during a series of interviews with men and women of different age groups coming from 21 countries. The stories have been transcribed and published both in Italian and in the original language with the support of an exceptional publisher, Roberto Piumini. These short sentences will lead the traveler from one station to the next along an intimate journey: the "common" fact of talking to the soul of each of us merges all colours and provenances.

This Milanese edition of Luoghi comuni is only the beginning: everyone is invited to participate with a personal story by writing to luoghicomuni@lettera27.org. These new voices will join the original nucleus and will travel to other Italian cities (Rome, Turin, Padua, Verona, Bologna) on other means of transportation, in other public spaces, transforming a distracted glimpse into the possibility of a smile and complicity with the Other.

Watch our stories on flickr and YouTube and the pdf catalog.