The Secrets of Italy

by Corrado Augias

  Edmondo De Amicis was born in 1846 in the Ligurian town of Oneglia. When Heart was published he’d just turned thirty and was enjoying a degree of fame as a polite and precise reporter. In September 1870 the periodical L’Italia militare (“Military Italy”) sent him to report on the breach of Porta Pia, a watershed event during the Capture of Rome, the final event of Italian unification. A few months later, bolstered by reader support, he began collecting and publishing his many travel writings, chronicling trips to Spain in 1872, Holland and London in 1874, and Morocco, Constantinople, and Paris in 1879. Nowadays we’d say he started out as a “special envoy.” He wrote a fluid, transparent prose whose simplicity draws you in, sometimes focusing on effect but primarily hinging on sentiment. He favored small events and observed them in minute detail, remarking on what he saw with great subtlety and from an intimate point of view. Conscious of the fact that he wasn’t an epic writer, he took refuge in the prose sketch and keen observation of habits and customs.

  His two sons, Furio and Ugo, brought him back to covering elementary school experiences after a few initial pieces, penned years before, included pages wherein the tone and cadence of Heart were already present.

  Indeed, little me, poor me, I who live on brown bread and go about dressed in rags, unknown to the world and subject of compassion for the few who know me; I—if I so desire, if I study a lot, if I work hard—one day I’ll make tens of thousands of people, the crème de la crème of this city, shut right up, as they do now, to hear my name and strain to catch a glimpse of me, whispering “There he is,” and telling their little boys, all dressed in velvet, “Do as he does!…” I can stay up all night, I can. And if I don’t have a lamp? Well then, I’ll have my neighbor give me the stubs of his spent candles.4

  The writer closely follows his two boys’ progress, so school life is right before his eyes each day: his sons, his sons’ friends, the teachers, the parents waiting in a crowd outside for their kids to exit. He steals a gesture here and there, an overheard phrase, the image of a boy consoling one of his poorer classmates, a teacher’s nod. Thus Heart was born. On February 16, 1886, he writes to his publisher: “Enthusiasm has swept me off my feet. I can think of nothing else, and care for nothing but my book Heart; chapter follows chapter, half of the work is already done—written down between alternating tears and bursts of joy.”5 In an interview years later his son Ugo revealed that in the months his father was writing Heart the author smoked dozens of cigars a day and never left the house. He worked standing up, writing on a tall lectern in his apartment overlooking the Piazza san Martino.

  By May it was done, after just six months of work. In a letter to his friend Orazio Barberis he confides: “At this very moment, midnight, I finished my children’s book, and I cannot hold back from sharing the news with you, my dearest friend.”

  On October 15, 1886, just in time for the first day of school, the book appeared in shop windows, with a fire engine–red cover. The school featured in the book was based on the Moncenisio School on Via Cittadella, in Turin—and so it was to be a children’s book, or rather a “chapter book for first-grade elementary school students,” as the author specified in one of his letters. And yet the book that was released after those six months of intense work was something else entirely. In 1923 Heart celebrated its first million copies sold. By 1958 it had sold three million. After that everyone lost track, and there’s no telling how many millions of copies there are in circulation today.

  Where did its immense success come from?

  Heart’s plot strikes chords as elementary as the school in which the story takes place. The author puts himself in the shoes of a third-grade pupil, Enrico Bottini, as he keeps a diary of his school year, as the subtitle, “A Schoolboy’s Journal,” implies. The congenial Enrico so completely takes on the role of narrator that he’s the book’s least colorful character. Around him we find an entire class (an overcrowded class, but that’s how it was back then) of fifty-four pupils, a dozen of whom we get to know quite well as the story develops. As the author introduces them one by one, the reader realizes that each character embodies not just a psychology, but a concrete function. As each makes his entry, De Amicis outlines his key characteristics: Coretti is the one who “wears chocolate-colored trousers and a catskin cap”; Garrone “is the biggest boy in the class … his head is large, his shoulders broad”; Votini is the boy “who is very well dressed, who always wears fine Florentine plush”; Nobis “seems very haughty,” and so on.6 Much like in ancient poetry, the repetition of these attributes helps orient the reader amid the crowd of students. But it also has a more rhetorical function, and shows us that we’re dealing not so much with real flesh-and-blood boys as we are their stand-ins, the roles each one has to play, improbable as they may seem at times. Basically, from the first page onward Heart takes the tone of an “epic,” or of an agitprop drama, if you will. As in Jesuit theater, the works of Bertolt Brecht, and Homer’s Odyssey—to reference the loftiest, most remote example—repetition serves the purpose of proving to the reader that the characters are moved by forces beyond their own voluntary control, obedient solely to the function they’re there to carry out.

  Around and above this little brigade of students come the parents, schoolmasters, and schoolmistresses, two of whom were destined to become proverbial figures. One is “called ‘the little nun,’ because she always dresses in dark colors, with a black apron, and has a small white face, hair that is always smooth, very bright eyes, and a delicate voice, that seems to be forever murmuring prayers.” The other is the even more famous young teacher “who wears a large red feather on her little bonnet.”7 These two semilegendary characters have been lost along with the mythic schools of yore, the desks carved up by pocketknives, the permanently inkless inkwells, and chalk screeching across slate blackboards.

  The material might be simplistic, but the structure is highly articulated. There’s Enrico’s narration, which forces him to be present at all times. There are letters from his father, mother, and occasionally his sister, also included in his diary—a strategy that allows the author to step out of the schoolboy’s perspective and provide an adult’s point of view. Last, there are nine “monthly stories” set within the broader narrative. They include: “The Little Vidette of Lombardy,” “The Little Florentine Writer,” “The Sardinian Drummer Boy,” and, most famous of all, “From the Appenines to the Andes” (the longest, too, at thirty-four pages), which brought me to tears twice—once as I read it, and again when I saw the film adaptation Flavio Calzavara produced in 1943.

  Completely surrendering to the author’s intentions, I lost myself in the story, absorbed in the fate of the poor little boy who’d gone halfway around the world to find his mother. One day he approaches a carriage to ask the coachman something. His mother is right there inside, just a step away, but the carriage drives off and they don’t spot each other. It’s an emotional stroke of genius. I even remember, if memory serves, hearing sobs rise up in the dark theater from the distressed, disillusioned audience as the carriage began rolling away.

  All in all, it’s a singular book with rich emotional content and a fairly innovative structure, when compared with standard late nineteenth-century literary canons.

  De Amicis was a lot less naive than we naive readers might think—indeed, he knew exactly what he was going for. First, to push us to tears, something he certainly succeeded at in my case. Then, through intense sentiment, to attain the goal he forthrightly states in his preface: “Now read this book, boys; I hope you will be pleased with it, and that it may do you good.”8 Therefore, Heart is supposed to “do you good.” The author was convinced that literature has a moral end, and remained convinced of it when he later became a socialist. In an 1895 interview with fellow writer Ugo Ojetti, he reaffirmed that belief: “Art, if it is really art, mustn’t preach, but must instead serve a concrete purpose.”

  Part of the “good” that reading Heart was to do was also to spread the kind of work ethic
so deeply rooted in the Anglo-Saxon mentality yet so ephemeral in Latin countries. Translated into the perspective of a late nineteenth-century Piedmontese, that meant solidarity between socioeconomic classes, a respect for the State (or love of country, if you will, complete with repeated references to the flag and the army), good faith, a clear conscience. Such values could seem superfluous, outdated, or even ambiguous—but the lack of such values was evident back when De Amicis was writing, and remains evident today.

  Once the Kingdom of Italy was unified, for better or worse, the coexistence of its people had to be based on uniform codes of conduct. The page in which the Calabrian boy, Coraci, is welcomed by his third-grade classmates, all Piedmontese, is just one of the many examples from the book. Back then there was a huge gap to bridge, and the gap remains equally vast for Coraci’s present-day counterparts, often named Mehmed, Murad, or Josip.

  The backdrop behind the characters is the school itself, the teachers, the lessons, the simple fact of sharing a classroom for a few hours each day. De Amicis insists on the concept: “The school seems to make them all equals and friends,” and later on, “Hurrah for brave comrades, and hurrah for school, which makes one family of you, of those who have and those who have not!”9 He portrays school as the place where you learn not only reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also to live alongside others with a spirit of solidarity, if nothing else; it’s the place where national identity is built. The only two characters who are irredeemable according to this progressive vision are, not surprisingly, Carlo Nobis, the vain young aristocrat, and the wicked, underprivileged Franti. Neither of them share the group’s values—indeed, they reject them and, motivated by opposing logics, consider them unfitting to their status as outsiders with respect to the overarching bourgeois order of things. With the exclusion of those two extremes, the pedagogy presented in Heart harmoniously unites the entire socioeconomic field, the various trades and professions, and the nascent industrial society De Amicis had admired at the 1878 Universal Exposition in Paris.

  This new society could only gain a foothold through a massive drive for collective education, to help spread an ingrained “sense of duty.” In order for this to succeed major effort had to be made, and a large part of it fell to the schools. The scholastic system therefore became the front line upon which the nation’s future depended. Given that perspective, the following scene is less a model of bourgeois urbanity than it is the embodiment of a precise moral message. Here is how Enrico Bottini describes the meeting between his father and his father’s old teacher:

  “Are you,” asked my father, raising his hat, “Vincenzo Crosetti, the schoolmaster?” The old man raised his hat also, and replied: “I am,” in a voice that was somewhat tremulous, but full. “Well, then,” said my father, taking one of his hands, “permit one of your old scholars to shake your hand and to inquire how you are. I have come from Turin to see you.”10

  But even this scene has its opposite, as recorded in the same period. In a report filed by senator and teacher Francesco Torraca for the years 1895–96 we read that “a majority of municipal administrators, and along with them the most well-to-do citizens, outright hate and oppose public education—they view it as an equalizing force, which terrifies them.” He further notes that this is especially the case in southern Italy, but is also a factor in the North. That sense of terror has survived through the years, and remains fully intact today. When the right-wing exponent Letizia Moratti became minister of public education in the early twenty-first century, she was quick to remove the adjective “Public” from her department’s title—she, too, was terrified by its egalitarian sound, even if she was likely unaware that by doing so she dredged up a reactionary old taboo.

  Heart immediately won a vast readership and met with a triumphal welcome nationwide, with the exception of the Catholic community, which was bothered by the fact that the author had utterly ignored religion, and went so far as to omit any mention of the major religious holidays that take place during the school year. In Heart there’s no Christmas, no Easter, no Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Each episode is steeped in the civic, state-based religiosity that characterized the liberal currents of the Risorgimento.11 The ecclesiastical authorities were unwavering, and the book was flagged as a text “unsuitable for children.”

  The debate was launched by an article published in L’Unità cattolica (“Catholic Unity”). The liberal and Protestant press then reacted. In Turin a Waldensian pastor organized a well-attended conference in defense of the book, focusing on the subject of “De Amicis’s Heart and the heart of the L’Unità cattolica.” De Amicis didn’t attend, but they told him about it and their support comforted him. A few days later he sent the news to his publisher, writing: “I tell you this as a bit of consolation after the clerical attacks, which it seems to me, deep down, have made you detest the fact that I didn’t sanctify Christmas, Easter, and the Resurrection in my book.”

  Its major success, both domestic and international, inevitably inspired plagiarisms and parodies. The poet Francesco Gaeta, skeptical of Heart’s values, once told the philosopher Benedetto Croce about his idea for a sequel, a tale that amused him no end. Croce summed it up this way: “In Gaeta’s playful continuation of the story Enrico—who had spent his youth surrounded by the incessant sweetness of moral, tender, sublime spectacles—hadn’t developed sufficient defenses against actual reality and its demonic powers. In the end, between the seduction of the new and his own inexperience, he winds up in jail!” Another parody was inspired by the episode that, in Heart, is dated December 17 and titled “The School-Mistress”:

  Signora Cromi, the oldest of the schoolmistresses, came to teach the school; she has two grown-up children, and she has taught several women to read and write, who now come to accompany their sons … She was sad to-day, because one of her sons is ill. No sooner had they caught sight of her, than they began to make an uproar. But she said, in a slow and tranquil tone, “Respect my white hair; I am not only a school-teacher, I am also a mother”; and then no one dared to speak again.12

  In M. Nigra Garigliola’s Buon Cuore (1906), schoolmistress Cromi becomes schoolmistress Dorati, and the new version sounds like this: “Signora Dorati, the oldest of the schoolmistresses, has one son in the loony bin, and her other son wants to become a priest. As she entered there was an infernal uproar; the good woman stepped to the lectern and, caressing the tumultuous class with her calm gaze, said: ‘Would you prefer that schoolmaster Bonfanti come instead, the one who always threatens severe punishment, and has already maimed half of his students?’ And then no one dared to speak again.”

  Then came Umberto Eco’s essay “Elogio di Franti” (“In Praise of Franti”), first published in 1963. Eco imagines the notorious Franti “with the vivid memory of the gesture Coretti’s father had given his son, his hands still warm, the affection of the King … by the dawn of the new century, a long ascent had prepared him to practice under the pseudonym Gaetano Bresci.”13 Each era has recast Heart according to its tastes. Even the author Alberto Arbasino reckoned with Heart (in his 1964 book Certi romanzi, “Certain Novels”), underlining the sadistic/penitential atmosphere that hangs over the entire book, much as it does in all of Puccini’s operas. But then he adds: “Edmondo [De Amicis] and Giacomo [Puccini], and even Gabriele [D’Annunzio] remain ‘minor masters,’ unsurpassed in their ability to industrially transform even the most disconcerting ‘transgressions’ into impeccably functional products.” Criticism, objections, and mockery, over a century after the book’s debut, are yet another sign of its unquestionable vitality. That said, Eco took all the necessary precautions, stipulating: “But in order to laugh, and to give his laughter its full strength, anyone who laughs must accept and believe in, even parenthetically, the thing he’s laughing at. He must also laugh from within it, if you can say such a thing, otherwise his laughter is meaningless.… Anyone who laughs must therefore be the ‘son’ of a given situation and completely accept it, almost love
it, and therefore, like a wicked child, be able to mock it.”14

  The truth is that it’s easy to parody any work that exhibits—or, in this case, flaunts—any conception of common values. Any positive spin put on such supposed shared values brings with it the reasoning behind its weaknesses, and any propaganda—from medieval tragedy to Jesuit theater and “Socialist Realism”—can be made fun of, rendering its ethical and ideological assumptions void.

  De Amicis drops precise references to the political and social pecking order of various characters and episodes throughout his novel; his aim is to prove that, despite class differences, bonds of friendship and mutual respect can nevertheless be formed between these third-grade students. As literary critic Alberto Asor Rosa quite fairly writes (in Storia d’Italia, “History of Italy,” vol. 4), this is the very same bond the fate of a future Italy could have been based upon, had it risen to become a bona fide “national pact.”

  In March 1908, a record number of people attended De Amicis’s funeral—second only to the funeral held for the composer Giuseppe Verdi a few years before. But neither the author’s popularity nor the undeniable success of Heart was enough to make that “national pact” come about; back then, as today, it remained a distant dream.

  Gabriele D’Annunzio, a writer as driven as De Amicis, also completed The Child of Pleasure in only six months, as the manuscript proudly stated: “Francavilla al Mare, July–December, 1888.”

  It was Turin against Rome. These books embodied two extremes: one side offered an overtly pedagogical aim; the other offered an explosive, hedonistic sensuality. Conversely, the latter could be read as a languid yearning stoked by a selfish quest for what the title explicitly declares—pleasure. De Amicis offered a spare, functional prose; D’Annunzio, on the other hand, offered a lush, sensual, highly refined language.