#books


“Today first day of school. Those three months of vacation in the countryside passed like a dream! My mother took me to the Baretti section this morning to get me enrolled for the third grade: I thought about the countryside, and I was reluctant. All the streets were teeming with boys; the two bookseller shops were crowded with fathers and mothers who bought backpacks, folders and notebooks, and in front of the school there were so many people, that the janitor and the civic guard struggled to keep the door clear. "

No, we are not in Diagon Alley. No, there are no Harry, Ron and Hermione who hastily make the last purchases of magic wands and brooms before taking the train to Hogwarts.

Yet the feeling is the same: the tingling start of a new school year that will be full of news, promises, but also of difficulties. Enrico Bottini is not Harry Potter and Turin is not London but he too, in order to grow, will have to face a reality that is not always pleasant, not always corresponding to what a child's dreams are.

And the success of this novel, at least in Italy, was comparable to that of the English saga.

Libro cuore, therefore, not only Cuore, "the book" par excellence, capable of remaining in the collective imagination as an emblem of moral teaching.

Published in 1886 by the Milanese publishing house Treves, "Cuore" by Edmondo De Amicis (1846 - 1908) tells, in the form of a diary, the school year of a third elementary school in Turin, with the protagonist Enrico Bottini, his classmates, plus other minor characters. Who does not remember the good Garrone and the perfidious Franti, the Muratorino with the hare face, Nelli the hunchback, the superb Nobis, the master Perboni - solitary and worthy - the teacher with the red feather. Some figures have become typical, such as Derossi, now synonym of top of the class.

"That class becomes the window from which we look at Italy in the late nineteenth century," says Cappuccio. In addition to the pupils, the janitors and the teachers, families, with their different social affiliations, with their trades, their miseries and nobility, appear in history. Turin is represented, with the streets, squares, the circus, the soldiers parading, but post-unification Italy is also shown or, at least, there is the intention of inventing it through an amalgamation, a merger .

The classroom is an interclass free trade zone, in which small and high bourgeois, workers and subproletarians coexist. Maestro Perboni, the parents, try to establish and inculcate a common code of values ​​to share, based on the trinity God, Homeland, Family. A tiring attempt to reach an agreement in a newly made Italy which, unfortunately, will remain unequal and disunited for too long.

“Remember well what I tell you. In order for this to happen, that a Calabrian boy was like in his home in Turin, and that a Turin boy was like at home in Reggio Calabria, our country fought for fifty years, and thirty thousand Italians died. You must respect yourselves, love each other among yourselves; but who of you offended this companion, because he was not born in our province, would make himself unworthy of ever raising his eyes from the ground when a tricolor flag passes. "

The educational intent is overflowing in each of the episodes but, above all, in the famous monthly stories of a Risorgimental, patriotic and edifying nature. Well known The little Lombard lookout, From the Apennines to the Andes, The little Florentine scribe, etc, read and reread by children of all ages, still capable of bringing tears to the eys of grandparents and grandchildren. And, however, these same stories with a moralistic and didactic intent offer a glimpse of the social question, dealing with military life, the condition of elementary teachers, emigration.

The criticism ascribes De Amicis to the minor Manzonism, considers him a mediocre author for his flat and discursive prose, the too open intention of moral elevation, the "short breath" of the narrative. Dozens of parodies have been made, Umberto Eco has even reversed the perspective in his "praise of Franti", where the villain is elected as the only subversive bulwark against a mediocre society that will develop fascism. Yet the book, at least for those of past generations, remained a milestone, to be kept on the knees and read together with mothers and grandmothers, moved by certain heroisms that always resulted in the extreme self-sacrifice, in that funeral atmosphere that had to be common at a time when infant mortality was high and infections lowered citizens' life expectancy. A climate that was, however, also of great confidence in the future, in progress, in the improvement which seemed inevitable, thanks above all to the spread of culture and literacy.

"Imagine this vast swarming of boys of a hundred peoples, this immense movement of which you are a part, and think: - If this movement ceased, humanity would fall into barbarism; this movement is the progress, the hope, the glory of the world. - Courage then, little soldier of the immense army. Your books are your weapons, your class is your team, the battlefield is the whole earth, and victory is human civilization. Don't be a cowardly soldier, my Enrico. "

There is a question, in these dark days, where certain ideals have gone.