At 97, she is the testimonial of the new campaign of the publishing house "Rubbettino" to raise awareness of reading. She is "Aunt Gina" and lives in Cervicati, a town of not even 1,000 inhabitants in the province of Cosenza, in Calabria. Gina Lanzillotta spends her days immersed in the pages of her books. She attended school for only a few years, like many people of her age, but she found in books faithful companions, capable of giving her happy moments and relief from life's labors.

"Aunt Gina," despite her advanced age, did not want to give up her great passion of reading and uses a magnifying glass to do so. The photo of her sitting on the steps of her house with a book resting on her lap and the magnifying glass in her hand thus became the one used by Rubbettino for its campaign on social media and bookstores.

The 'image is accompanied by a sentence by Luis Sepúlveda from the book "The Old Man Who Read Love Novels": "He knew how to read. He possessed the antidote against the terrible poison of old age."

The story of "Aunt Gina" was discovered by anthropologist Ottavio Cavalcanti, who reported it to Rubbettino. "A story," says a note from the publishing house, "that becomes both emblem and spur for a land like Calabria, which remains nailed to the last places in the national ranking of reading indexes, but at the same time has always seen culture and reading as tools of redemption and social growth.