RRome, 10 December. (askanews) – A renewed graphic design with a more manageable format, fresher contents, such as advice on do-it-yourself, the interpretation of dreams, the rituals of our tradition and illustrated lists of seasonal foods. The oldest Almanac in Italy, Blackbeard, returns to newsstands, bookshops and online, for a year-long journey with advice and good practices for living in harmony with nature and the sky. The underlying theme of 2025 is “cultivated and uncultivated”: every month, in fact, the gaze is on a spontaneous plant and a cultivated one, of which Blackbeard talks about the rites and myths, the healing and culinary properties, teaching how to recognize them, collect them and use them, or grow them in the vegetable garden, in the garden and on the balcony.
“The whole world is a vegetable garden, if you know where to look” is the motto of Blackbeard who for over 260 years, from the pages of the Almanac, the longest running in Italy, presents the reader every day with an opportunity to rediscover the beauty of simple gestures of everyday life. The Blackbeard Almanac was included by UNESCO in the Memory of the World register as “the symbol of a literary genre that contributed to creating popular culture and the identity of entire nations”.
Its pages include the calendar of the month’s events, with traditional festivals and celestial phenomena, the guide to growing according to the phases of the moon in the vegetable garden, in the garden, on the balcony and on the windowsill, seasonal products, typical traditional recipes Italian, the horoscope to have fun with the zodiac and the lunar calendar, which suggests how to live better every day with the favor of the Moon and the stars.
Blackbeard is 100% eco-friendly, as it is made with recyclable paper from sustainable forests and not treated with chlorine, and is printed with vegetable inks obtained from renewable raw materials. A concrete gesture that reflects the values that have always animated the pages of the Almanac. Finally, Blackbeard’s house, in Spello, opens its doors to visitors. Located in an ancient eighteenth-century silkworm factory, it houses the Barbanera 1762 Foundation, with 50 thousand documents including ancient almanacs and calendars, and a vegetable garden of the Seasons, a treasure chest of biodiversity where the philosophy and good practices described in the almanac are experimented every day. A journey through tradition, nature and culture.
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