AEGEEans love to share their opinions, ideas, but also gadgets, stickers and postcards. AEGEE-Warszawa knows best because they have been organising for some years now the famous Christmas Postcrossing. The Culture Interest Group, created last year, decide to take this sharing attitude of AEGEEans to the next level by organising the first edition of the BookCrossing. Alessandro Montefameglio, one of the founders, told us something more. Deadline? The 5th of February! Hurry up and fill the form to share your favourite book.
Alessandro Montefameglio
The AEGEEan: Please introduce you and the CIG.
Alessandro: My name’s Alessandro Montefameglio and I founded CIG together with Sergio Genovesi. The main purpose of CIG is to spread good European culture, offer valuable cultural contents, from literature, philosophy, music, visual arts to cinema. The very heart of the project is a cultural blog called Momus which now celebrates its first birthday. A little about me? I am doing my master in Philosophy in Padua, I am an avid reader and I love writing.
What is BookCrossing?
BookCrossing is the first big initiative that we (as CIG) made this year. Our project is to let all the members of AEGEE, from every antenna, share their passion for books and literature. The important thing is that we are trying to avoid digital devices and Internet: one member send as a gift an actual book with an actual letter to another member and the other member do the same. From that point they can talk about the book they read and meet each other.
Culture Interest Group during Spring Agora Bergamo
Why did you decide to launch this initiative?
Because we enthusiastically think that literature and, above all, books are not a memory from the past. Even if today, in the digital era, people read less, books remain something that we cannot avoid to refer to, to use, to enjoy. We are not nostalgic people, even if it seems so: we strongly believe that the truth is that a book is still something beautiful to share. Literature put together people in such a human way that no Kindle or Netflix can compete.
How will it work?
It’s a very simple process: a member of an antenna send a book via post, which has been significant to her or him, and the other member do the same. They also have to tell each other why they chose that book and not that other book. We hope noy only a discussion can start, but also a friendship between two members.
When is the deadline?
The 5th of February.
You wrote only paper books. Do you think that paper books are still the favourites or PFDs or E-books are the future?
Absolutely. We are not just talking about the simple pleasure that a paper book can give to the reader. 
We think that paper books are not only more practical and useful than an eBook, but that no digital content can beat the one of a book or of a library. When you want to know something – if you really want to know it and not just have the resume of the resume – you have to go to a library, not on the Internet. Paper is never going to die (hopefully!).
A book is the window to infinite universes, what is the most magical thing about reading a book?
I will always think that reading literature or whatever is written is an experience so different from listening to music or watching a movie. I do not want to compare them: there is Shakespeare, there is Schubert and there is Terry Gilliam. But there is something in literature that the other arts will never have. Literature can tell a story, can show a feeling and say a concept in a way that a painting or a sonata or a movie cannot do, because in literature imagination have more freedom than in other places. While reading, you can truly live what you are reading.
Written by Erika Bettin, AEGEE-Verona