Pedagogy, Aesthetics, and Humanism: The Three Muses of Italian Children's Literature Theory

E se la Musa del De Amicis non è una delle divine Pieridi, e nemmeno quella dell’alta filosofia, è pur sempre una signora rispettabile: èla bonaria Musa della Pedagogia.

—Benedetto Croce

In April 1993 a proposal titled “Eclipsed by a Wooden Boy’s Shadow: Is There Any Other Italian Children’s Literature besides Pinocchio?” was awarded a Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) Research Fellowship. One of the objectives of the proposed research was to attend the Bologna Book Fair, the largest book fair in the world dedicated exclusively to children’s literature, in order to collect information on the current state of the literature, both primary and secondary, in Italy.

The experience of attending the 30th annual Bologna Book Fair was, in a word, extraordinary. The principal reason for this extraordinariness resides in the Fair’s dazzling size and scope: some 1,336 exhibitors were in attendance, their displays occupying over 21,300 square meters of space in 11 separate buildings. Of these 1,336 exhibitors, 212 were Italian; the balance—over 1,150—represented over 60 different countries. Other Fair participants represent equally diverse groups, as the following statistics on 1992 attendees reveal: over 21,000 children’s book professionals from all over the world attended, including 2,140 publishers, 940 librarians, 1,130 authors, 3,209 illustrators, and 6,971 educators, scholars, and critics.

It would be difficult to imagine an atmosphere more conducive to international dialogue on the present state of children’s literature than that offered by the Bologna Book Fair. There, one can discern firsthand the present lineaments of national literature production and the give-and-take (or lack thereof) of international exchange. Furthermore, one can also participate in many of the roundtable discussions, conferences, and seminars that serve to chart, analyze, and guide the realm of literary theory as well. My own participation in the Fair and the subsequent research that grew out of that experience provides the basis of this article, which focuses on the major lines of development in Italian children’s literature theory over the last few decades.

Preliminary Observations: The Role of Institutions

As in so many other countries, the formation of Italian children’s literature and its theory was heavily influenced by two principal social and educational institutions, the Church and the State. Both perceived a literature for children in the Horatian light of utile et dulce, with the emphasis usually—quite naturally and unsurprisingly—on the utile. While Christian virtues abound in pre-eighteenth-century works such as Andrea da Barberino’s Il romanzo di Guerrino detto il Meschino (early fifteenth century), Giulio Cesare Croce’s Le avventure di Bertoldo (late sixteenth century), and Giambattista Basile’s Il pentamerone (1634), it was only toward the dawn of the nineteenth century that religious-minded authors such as Father Francesco Soave and Giuseppe Taverna (both of whom penned volumes of Novelle morali in 1782 and 1803 respectively), became increasingly involved with the production of children’s literature. During the mid-nineteenth century the formal and stylistic scope of such “educational books” was enlarged by authors such as Luigi Alessandro Parravicini, Pietro Thouar and the two priests, Don Giulio Tarra and Don Giovanni Bosco. In the hands of men such as these, the moral and social formation of Italian children was pursued with systematic diligence by means of both word and image. And, as Antonio Faeti points out in Letteratura per l’infanzia, this phenomenon continues to this day, as the extensive editorial campaigns of the publishing houses of the Antonian and Pauline orders reveal. ¹

While the moral, social, and educational values of the Roman Catholic Church may be said to have pervaded Italian children’s literature and its theory from its inception, the role of the State in its formation is a much more recent phenomenon. One explanation for this may be the fact that Italy became a united nation only a little over 120 years ago. The institution of the Italian state made its mark on children’s literature very early on, however. For example, as contemporary...