Edmondo De Amicis
Edmondo De Amicis (Oneglia, 1846 – Bordighera, 11 March 1908) was a writer and journalist, author of Cuore (Heart). Ligurian by birth and Piedmontese by upbringing, he settled permanently in Turin and never left[1]: the school in Cuore is a Turin school, and the trams and streets of La carrozza di tutti, his portrait of the city at the end of the nineteenth century, are Turin's own.
From Oneglia to Cuneo, and first contact with Turin
He was born in Oneglia on 21 October 1846 to Francesco, a "royal salt banker," and Teresa Busseti; the 1931 Enciclopedia Italiana gives the date as 31 October instead[2][1]. In 1848 the family moved to Cuneo, where he received his early education[2]: as an adult he devoted the pages of Ricordi d'infanzia e di scuola (1906) to that city, which he described as one of the most beautiful in Italy for its crown of Alps[3].
In 1862 he moved to Turin to attend the Collegio Candellero, which prepared students for the military academy[2][4]. In the city he began to mix with writers and journalists, among them Giovanni Prati and Vittorio Bersezio[2]. In 1863 he sent some poems to Alessandro Manzoni and received, as the Dizionario Biografico records, "an encouraging and flattering reply"; in 1866 he visited Manzoni at Brusuglio[2].
The officer and the journalist
He left the military school of Modena in 1865 as a second lieutenant of infantry and fought that same year in the war of 1866[2], at the Battle of Custoza[5][4]. The following year he served among the troops sent to assist cholera victims; he was then called to Florence, to the newspaper L'Italia militare[1]. The sketches he published there became the volume La vita militare (1868), which made him famous[1]. As a correspondent he witnessed the entry of Italian troops into Rome in 1870[5].
In 1871 he left the army[2]. Over the following eight years he published six travel books: on Spain (1872), on Holland and the Ricordi di Londra (1874), on Morocco (1876), on Constantinople (1878-79), and the Ricordi di Parigi (1879)[1]; some of these journeys were made as a correspondent for L'Illustrazione italiana, the periodical just founded by Treves[2].
Cuore, a Turin school
The book was written in just a few months: De Amicis composed it in a single burst between February and May 1886[2]. On 16 February of that year he wrote to his publisher, Emilio Treves:
"I live among my elementary schoolchildren – I see them, I hear them, I adore them; it no longer seems to me that I was born for anything other than what I am doing."
The letter is quoted in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani[2]. Cuore was published by Treves in Milan in October 1886 and within two months reached its forty-first edition; by 1923 it had sold over a million copies[2]. It is the diary of a school year, from October to July, kept by a third-grade pupil[6]. The year is 1881-82 and the school, in Turin, is called in the book "Sezione Baretti": it corresponds to the Moncenisio school at via Cittadella 3, near the writer's home and attended by his sons Furio and Ugo, demolished after the Second World War[7]. The book also features the barracks on via Cernaia and the Carceri Nuove prison[7]. Sentimental and patriotic tales are woven into the plot, from Dagli Appennini alle Ande to La piccola vedetta lombarda to Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino[8]. It opens thus: "Today is the first day of school. Those three months of vacation in the countryside went by like a dream!"[8]. The book was translated into many languages[8].
Emigration and socialism
In 1889 he published Sull'Oceano, the diary of an Atlantic crossing aboard the steamship "Galileo" with 1,600 emigrants bound for South America[2]. Il romanzo d'un maestro (1890), about a teacher, and Fra scuola e casa (1892) followed[2][6].
Around 1890 he moved closer to socialism and declared his adherence publicly in February 1892[2]; the Enciclopedia Italiana dates his conversion to 1891[1]. This was not an isolated case: in the same period intellectuals such as Arturo Graf, Cesare Lombroso, Giuseppe Giacosa, and Zino Zini embraced the new ideas[2]. He contributed to numerous socialist periodicals[2], though without fully committing himself to political life[6]. In 1895 he explained his idea of literature to Ugo Ojetti: "Art, if it wants to be art, must not preach, but must have a purpose"[2]. From those years also comes Primo maggio, an unfinished novel that remained unpublished until 1980[2][5].
1898 was a year of bereavement: his mother, in her eighties, died, and at the end of the year his eldest son Furio took his own life; the father dedicated to him the writings collected in In tua memoria, figlio mio![2].
Turin from the tram: La carrozza di tutti
De Amicis's most Turin-centered book is La carrozza di tutti, published by Treves in 1899[9]: the diary of a year spent observing life along a tramway line[1]. The year is 1896, recounted month by month from the seats of the horse-drawn tram running on the city's tracks, then operated by the Società Torinese and the Società Belga[9] (the early seasons of the Turin tram, part of the city's transport system). The book opens thus:
"It was the first of January 1896. That morning I boarded the tram on corso Vinzaglio, in via Roma. All along the route, as far as via Garibaldi, ladies and gentlemen kept getting on and off..."
Across the seasons unfold the great boulevards with their view of the Alps, the Valentino, and the Mole Antonelliana, observed with the affection of a Turinese by adoption[9].
The final years
In 1905 he published L'idioma gentile, setting out his ideas on the Italian language[2], and in 1906 the Ricordi d'infanzia e di scuola[5]. He lived mainly between Turin and the Ligurian Riviera[6]. He died in Bordighera on 11 March 1908, struck by a brain lesion[2]. Umberto Bosco, writing about him in 1931, judged him the finest among the refined storytellers of his circle, such as Barrili, Farina, and Giacosa, and saw in his sincere love of goodness the most endearing trait of his personality[1].