Food and identity in Carlo Collodi’s Il viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino

ABSTRACT

In this article, I attend to how nineteenth-century Italian children’s writer Collodi portrayed food, particularly in the schoolbook Il viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino (Giannettino’s travel throughout Italy). My analysis builds on recent contributions – such as Montanari’s (2006), Ferguson’s (2020), and Pezzotti’s (2020), – that examined food and its related cultural background as significant indicators of character, whether individual, regional, or national. Scholars have turned their attention to how governments, writers or even communities employed food as part of material culture to consolidate imagined communities, or invent or recycle traditions. Existing analyses of the relationship between food and nationalism in Collodi’s works have limited their focus to Pinocchio, and so have not considered Collodi’s schoolbooks, which is what my article contributes to the scholarship. This article analyzes the substantial space Collodi dedicated to local foods in his schoolbooks. I argue that Collodi uses local foods to emphasize the importance of multiculturality as a valuable resource for national bonding.

KEYWORDS:

• Nation
• national identity
• nineteenth century
• children’s literature
• Italian literature
• food identity
• regional food
• food culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I will use the term “dissonance” referring to Silvia Valisa’s examination “on the dissonant configurations of gender within socially symbolic acts in the context of Italian modernity, as well as on the characters that complicate and oppose a hegemonic understanding of the relationship between narrative and gender.” (Valisa, 2014, 19). Valisa investigates the modern Italian novel, and underscores how certain characters – such as the nun Gertrude in Manzoni’s I promessi sposi – epitomize a dissonance if related to the dominant “ideological framework they inhabit”. According to Valisa, these characters “are carrying two ideological messages at once, or, in some cases, one message that is however in such clear opposition to the structural context as to continuously create doubts about its validity for the bearer of the message.” (Valisa, 2014, 18). In a similar way, I will examine possible “dissonances” in Collodi’s school texts, in relation to (paraphrasing Valisa) the nation-building framework they should have promoted.

2. As many newspapers of the time such as La Gazzetta del Popolo reported, the divulgation of the supposed-to-be secret clause of Convenzione di Settembre of 1864 caused a series of social and political upheavals. In fact, the King Vittorio Emanuele II forced the Prime Minister Marco Minghetti to resign; moreover, the people of Turin protested vehemently, causing disorders that ended up in more than fifty deaths and more than a hundred injured people between 21 and September 22, 1864.

3. In the digital edition available from the official website, Artusi gives three options for the Risotto alla Milanese, introducing the last version with the exclamation “Potete scegliere!”, http://www.pellegrinoartusi.it/80-risotto-alla-milanese-iii/ (Il risotto alla milanese).

4. “Quanti non muojono per l’intemperanza del mangiare e del bere! È vecchio il proverbio che dice: Uccide più gente la gola, che la spada. […] L’ uomo deve mangiare sol quanto basta per saziare la fame, deve bere sol quanto basta per estinguere la sete.” (Too many people die because of excessive eating and drinking! The old proverb says: “Gluttony kills more than the sword.” […] A man should eat enough to satiate his hunger, and drink enough to attenuate his thirst.) (Parravicini 1851, 32).

5. Vera Horn, “Assaporare la tradizione: cibo, identità e senso di appartenenza nella letteratura migrante” Rev. Ital. (Online) Revista de Italianística, no. 19–20 (2010), 174. See also Vito Teti, “Emigrazione, alimentazione, culture popolari” Storia dell’emigrazione italiana (2001).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Pagani

Andrea Pagani is Teaching Associate at Monash University. He received the PhD in Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics in 2021 at Monash University. He received a grant from LaTrobe University and the Italian Australian Foundation together with Dr Luigi Gussago in 2021. Their project ”Terra!” examines the impact of the Italian community in the rural areas of the State of Victoria in the recent era. He is also working on schoolbooks used by migrated Italian children in the 20th century in Australia, examining how the aboriginal communities were portrayed to a community of new migrants.