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Italy
Laura Kreyder
The stories children have read for centuries, such as Phaedrus’s fables, Ovid’s myths
and Aeneas’s adventures, come from Italy. Later there were medieval Christian legends,
collected by Jacopo da Varagine, and chivalrous romances. Then, from the sixteenth
century onwards, story writers like Straparola with Le piacevoli notti [Pleasant Nights] or
Giulio Cesare Croce with Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo [The Very Subtle Tricks of
Bertoldo] took inspiration from popular oral sources, some of them probably meant for
children. The sub-title of Lo cunto de li cunti, ovvero lo Trattenimiento de li peccerille [The
Tale of the Tales, or How to Entertain Little Girls] (1634–1636), a collection of tales
edited in Neapolitan dialect by Giambattista Basile stands out as the first work in which
little girls play an important role. But, like Perrault’s Fairy Tales, it was intended for adult
readers. Other critics (Fanciulli and Monaci 1935) have seen in Domenico Soresi’s
Novelle piacevoli e istruttive [Instructive and Pleasant Tales] (1768) the first text written
specifically for children. The date is meaningful (a few years after Emile) since it is
without doubt thanks to the spread of liberating ideas that books intended expressly for
children came into being in Italy. They are collections of passages: the childhoods of
famous persons, heroic deeds taken from history, and tales (like those of the Venetians
Gasparo and Carlo Gozzi, modelled on the Grimm brothers).
In the first half of the nineteenth century, partly out of hatred for the Austrians and
Bourbons, and partly out of admiration for Napoleon, a patriotic line was added, carried
along by the rising wave of Romanticism. It was obvious to campaigners in the battle
against illiteracy (which at that time involved three quarters of the population) that there
was a need for literature for schools, and so prize-winning competitions were set up for
the creation of children’s books. In 1837 Luigi Alessandro Parravicini (1799–1880) wrote
Giannetto, a compendium of knowledge and fiction for children, ‘a universal primer’
(Faeti 1977:62). Pietro Thouar (1809–1861), after a restless childhood in Florence,
undertook to write many Racconti pei giovanetti [Short Stories for Young People] and
Letture di famiglia [Family Readings] and created the Giornale per i fanciulli [Children’s
Journal] which was banned on account of the patriotic stand taken by a writer for whom
‘politics was not a profession but a creed’ (Montazio 1862:24). However, Catholic
educators also played their part, for example, Giulio Tarra (1832–1889), a priest and
head of the Deaf and Dumb Institute in Milan, who translated and reworked many
stories in his moralising prose.
The golden age of children’s literature in Italy, as throughout Europe, came with the
latter half of the nineteenth century. As a phenomenon it was accentuated by the