Bruno Munari believed that keeping the spirit of childhood alive in your life means maintaining a curiosity for knowledge, the joy of understanding, one’s will to communicate.

The issue of Dispensa that you are about to read takes cue from this consideration and sets out to discover how much is it left of the child within us, that allows us, even as adults, to continue discovering the world through eyes filled with dreams, joy, cheekiness, innocence, honesty, irreverence and – at times – cruelty.

We, the adults of today, have played with words and revisited our childhood, we have given voice to the children and allowed them to express themselves like the adults we would have wanted to become, creating a fantastic blend between mature awareness and innocent spontaneity.

We have let ourselves go, thrown ourselves fully into the role, relished grown up games like the Grand Gelinaz Shuffle or Postrivoro, and revealed the secret dreams – regardless of whether they then came true or not – of a few children who have now grown up. We have recounted real jobs that seem to have come out of a fairy tale and fantastic devices created to explore unknown universes. We’ve gone back to the world of characters that filled our childhoods and taken inspiration from them to invent new ones, only to realise that often you don’t need much – just a bit of woodland or a turkey for instance – to create a story.

And you, have you been thinking about what you want to be when you grow up? If not, you can do it now, as you thumb though the following pages of Dispensa.

Martina Liverani, the founder and editor of Dispensa