For too long " Cuore " by Edmondo De Amicis , published in 1888, was considered above all a novel of good feelings, conformist and respectable. It is, in fact, much more. The writer Marcello Fois confirms this by introducing the new edition published by Emons (2022, pp. 288, also e-book and audiobook), in which the traditional version also features a QR Code to listen to the actor Alessandro Benvenuti read aloud . To use the words of Fois: "Heart [...] is [...] a lay breviary to rely on when we are tempted by selfishness , to rediscover the need to be good, fundamental in an age where wickedness is rampant and generates disasters ”.
De Amicis's novel, not surprisingly, was born in a very particular moment in Italian history. Our country had recently been unified from a political point of view , but was "separated" by centuries in which its people had shared little or nothing . It was the Italy of a thousand dialects, heir to foreign domination and fragmentation into many states and statelets. Of course, the Italian nation had been made, but the Italians had to be made. Give them a common identity, a feeling, a shared culture.
De Amicis therefore imagined a book that didn't have one or a few protagonists, but focused on an entire elementary school class. A class that in its components represented a miniature cross-section of the entire nation . In Maestro Perboni's classroom we find the poor and the rich, the son of the worker, that of the professional and the craftsman . There are the kids from the north and the children from the south who have moved to Turin, the city where the novel is set, for work.
This humanity was called to share not only the time of the school year and the space in the classroom, but also a common feeling. The pupils were constantly urged to show solidarity even if they were different from each other, in the name of the common condition of pupils, but above all of Italians. Above all in the name of precise secular and bourgeois ideals deeply felt by De Amicis.
First of all the sense of duty and work ethic . These are values that for the Piedmontese writer had to be respected and kept alive a priori, not because they ensured the possibility of social or economic ascent, but because they represented a beacon capable of giving meaning to existence. Each pupil was told that "your books are your weapons, your class is your team, the battlefield is the whole earth, and victory is human civilization", to use the words of De Amicis's masterpiece . To these ethical principles were also added moral values: goodness, dedication, the spirit of sacrifice, patience, solidarity . The result was a non-negotiable, absolute value system that had to be practiced because it represented the good for the individual who practiced it and for the community of which the individual was a part.
It was a model , the one proposed by Cuore, which for De Amicis was necessary for a young and still fragile country , which had to fight to survive and, above all, progress. A model with still something to say to us Italians, who are divided even today and fragile we always are.
As Marcello Fois rightly says again in his introduction to the book: “ A book becomes a classic if it never stops speaking to us , if it continues to reveal something about us over time. And Cuore, even if we often forget it, is a great classic: a handbook to understand the present, to understand in what dark depths its roots sink".