Absent Fathers and Italian Nation-building in Carlo Collodi’s Books for School
From Firenze University Press Book: Rewriting and Rereading the XIX and XX-Century Canons
Andrea Pagani, Monash University
Carlo Lorenzini, widely known as Collodi (1826–1890), is well-known in classic European children’s literature for his classic Le avventure di Pinocchio, whose first episode was published in 1883 in the magazine Il giornale per i bambini. But he also wrote many schoolbooks, mostly centred around the young middle-class child Giannettino and his path towards a conservative education led by his mentor Dottor Boccadoro. The first text, Giannettino, published in 1877, was named after Parravicini’s Giannetto, the most popular schoolbook at the time. Giannettino was followed by La grammatica di Giannettino (1883), L’abbaco di Giannettino (1884), La geografia di Giannettino (1886), and Il viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino (1880, 1883, 1886), a volume made up of three books dedicated to tales of Giannettino’s travels throughout Italy’s North, Centre, and South. La lanterna magica di Giannettino, in 1890, concluded the collection. Furthermore, Collodi wrote other texts for school use, such as Minuzzolo (1878) or Libro di lezioni per la seconda classe elementare, secondo gli ultimi programmi (1885).
This article analyses Collodi’s schoolbooks, examining how the representation of paternal figures is informed by the author’s pedagogical approach in these works published 1877–1890. In those years, the recently formed Italian State — declared in 1861 and completed in 1871 with the annexation of Rome — faced the necessity of constructing a shared national identity for a heterogeneous community. Within that cultural-ideological process, the family was considered essential, and the padre played an undisputed authoritarian role. However, my analysis demonstrates how Collodi’s schoolbooks subvert that ideology through representing the dysfunctional paternal figure. Before reaching even wider popularity with his books for children, Collodi was also considered to be one of the most authoritative journalists and was certainly amongst the most caustic ones, as argued by Vincenzo Cappelletti, Cosimo Ceccuti and Daniela Marcheschi, who claim that “La Firenze dei giornali e dei giornalisti è per tanta parte la Firenze di Collodi” (2011, 33). In addition, the King of Italy Umberto I granted Collodi a Knighthood in 1878. This title, apparently, was conferred because of the success he had with Giannettino, published the year before (Prada 2018, 313).
Thus, by the beginning of the 1880s, Collodi was, without doubt, an authority amongst the Italian cultural élite. Moreover, his reputation as a journalist led him to be a celebrity before beginning his career as a writer for children. This article contributes to a recent scholarly re-assessment of Collodi’s work and its participation in the Italian nation-building process. The schoolbooks have historically earned Collodi a reputation as a conservative writer, but I investigate the extent to which Collodi’s schoolbooks subvert the strategies propounded by the Italian State. Most of the 20th century critical debate — and part of more recent criticism — viewed the wooden puppet Pinocchio, who defeated poverty thanks to hard work and commitment, as an archetype for the Italian bourgeoisie (Spadolini 1989 [1972], 243). In recent years, Daniela Marcheschi (2016) — head of the commission for Collodi’s Edizione Nazionale — re-examined Collodi’s masterpiece Le avventure di Pinocchio (1883) and questioned its limited reputation as the Italian-bourgeois Bildungsroman. Marcheschi, instead, discovered in the novel elements that dissent from the values promoted by the Italian State in its attempt to construct a shared national identity. Marcheschi demonstrated how values prized by the Italian State — loyalty, respect for, and identification with the official authority, the promotion of a stable middle-class — seemed to be subverted in Pinocchio.
