She didn't cry, but she spent the afternoon staring at the entrance door of the playroom, the 5-year-old girl left alone at her first birthday party.

It happens in Cortona, in the province of Arezzo: all the guests at the party did not show up. The parents, who live in Castiglione del Lago, on Trasimeno, where the little girl attends nursery school and where the Municipality is considering organizing a make-up party, are dismayed. A handful of kilometers separates Castiglione from Camucia, the modern part of Cortona, where there is the only playroom in an area that includes much of the Valdichiana Aretina and the Trasimeno district.

"I would have understood if only a few children had come and they would have been enough to make my daughter happy, but a defection like this, one hundred percent, I just can't explain it to myself ," the father told Corriere Fiorentino who, days later, cannot explain why. The family had booked the playroom for 35 people, including other children, but no one showed up.

According to the parent, "it's not a question of our origins and the little girl's", from the South, "I would rather say that it's a cultural problem of how these children and their parents were raised . But let's be clear: we don't bear a grudge against anyone".

(Unioneonline/D)