Vamba: children's literature is born with a bad and mischievous model "Gian Burrasca".
Long live pappa con pomodoro
by Michele Giocondi and Mario Mancini
And here we are at the 28th episode of the series of best-selling Italian authors. Children's literature takes the field which, as we know, has always been the most dynamic sector of the book industry worldwide. But in Italy something new happens with Vamba: the naughty, undisciplined and insolent boy arrives. Certainly not a model for families and children of the time. But the success of the character is such as to leave you stunned even as a cultural and sociological phenomenon.
The children's book
If there is a period in which the production of children's books went through a phase of particular fervor, it was precisely the one at the turn of the twentieth century: a few years earlier, a few years later. In recent years, the best that has been written has been concentrated, starting with De Amicis, continuing with Collodi and Salgari, and finally concluding with Vamba. And without forgetting, of course, the many other writers who have ventured into the genre in this period.
From their pen were born the characters who have shaped the youthful imagination, and not only theirs, thanks to the creation of figures who have become immortal both for our society and for the whole world, first of all Pinocchio.
They were books composed under different stimuli: at the spur of the money that was always lacking for household expenses, as happened to Salgari, struggling with a burdensome family and a seriously mentally ill wife. Or composed in a hurry to make up for some loss in gambling, standing up, leaning against a small shelf, in a corner of the bookshop-publishing house with which he collaborated, as happened to Collodi. And without any faith in what came out of his pen, indeed convinced that he was working on a "bambinata", just to scrape together those thousand lire agreed with his publisher, absolutely unaware of the masterpiece that was about to take flight towards eternity.
Still different the elaboration of Heart, meditated on for a long time, taken over and over again several times, and never completed; finally concluded quickly in a particularly inspired season, as sometimes happens to writers.
Gian Burrasca's Giornalino, on the other hand, had an even different gestation. Meanwhile, it follows them by about twenty years and was composed during the normal and industrious activity of a journalist and caricaturist, passionately immersed in the political struggle of the period, but at the moment in which he somehow began to distance himself from it, disappointed by the irrelevance of the results of his political engagement.
But the impact it had on our kids and on society as a whole for several generations was not much less than that of the great masterpieces that preceded it.
It was born from the mature and solid pen of a journalist, director and founder of newspapers who also combined his profession with a passion for youth dissemination and the education of children: Luigi Bertelli.
The life
Luigi Bertelli was born in Florence in 1860, but some bring the date forward by a couple of years, in a family of the lower middle class, father employed and landowner. Family conditions allow his parents to make him study at the Piarists, and he concludes his studies there despite his father's premature death when he is 13 years old. After graduating, the young man looks for a job and finds it on the railways, with final destination in Foggia.
At the same time he began to give vent to his great passion for journalism, collaborating with the Roman weekly "Fanfulla della Domenica" and with the newspaper "Capitan Fracassa". His pieces are very incisive, they strike readers, so much so that the director of "Capitan Fracassa" Luigi Arnaldo Vassallo, known by the nickname of Gandolin, offers him a permanent position as editor. Bertelli accepts it not at all sorry to give up the secure job on the railways, in reality never loved, and at the age of 26 he begins his journalistic career.
This would never have had continuity in a single masthead for more than a few years, and would have led him to work for several newspapers, often born and died in the space of a morning, but always coherently and irreducibly on the Mazzinian, secular, republican political side , national and progressive.
The pseudonym Vamba
It is in this period that he adopts the pseudonym that he will keep until the end: Vamba, the name of the jester of Ivanhoe, but also, he wanted to clarify himself, that of a Visigothic sovereign, as if to underline his dual nature, yes of a humorist, but also as a fighter engaged in the ideological battle.
Crispi's rise to power in 1887 pushes the "Capitan Fracassa", until then hostile to the government and its president Depretis, into a pro-government position. And so Vamba, the director Gandolin and other signatures, abandon the newspaper and found another one, "Don Quixote of La Mancha", from which they resume their fight for the government. The newborn newspaper will survive between ups and downs for only five years, until 1892. Then it will continue from 1893 until 1899, always led by the same group, with the partially new title of "Don Quixote of Rome".
These are years of hard work and considerable commitment in the political struggle, always conducted with proud and sometimes ferocious causticity against the shortcomings, hypocrisies, misdeeds of the opposing side, mocked and denigrated with pieces and caricatures, although ideologically contestable, but highly effective journalism. Memorable were the attacks on the powerful of the period, from Crispi to Pope Leo XIII, who, although on opposite sides, were united in Vamba's criticism and derision.
The plight of the press
The low number of readers, in a country where the illiteracy rate still remains very high, estimated in those years at half the population, the large presence of titles, never as high in Italy as in that period, with circulation of few or very few thousands of copies a day, and sometimes even less, always makes the life of the various newspapers stunted. The existence of those who work there is precarious.
In 1890, after various experiences and collaborations in ephemeral newspapers, Vamba returned to Florence and founded the "O di Giotto", another newspaper, "clear and round" as he would specify, as if this were a commitment and a trademark of his profession , and always from the same Republican and Mazzinian political side.
And from here the fight against intrigues, corruption, malpractice resumes once again, which according to him persists and cannot be eradicated from the country.
He doesn't even disdain to collaborate, even for practical needs, given that in the meantime he has started a family, as a draftsman for other periodicals. However, the magazine will have a short life, only two years.
The turning point towards the world of boys
A breakthrough meanwhile slowly begins to ripen. Vamba begins to feel disappointed and embittered about the fate of a country that always remains the same and unchangeable in its basic features, despite the political alchemies, the changes of government, the various personalities who face the political arena, the intentions of change never come to fruition (something we would have witnessed, mutatis mutandis, in other periods of our history, even very recent ones).
And then he decides to broaden his range of action from the political struggle to the commitment in the world of children. He does so in the name of clarity, honesty, the need not to lie to them, to educate them and prepare them for maturity, in the hope that they will then take over the country and realize those ideals that his generation is not capable of. to bring to completion.
It is not, indeed, a sharp turn, nor into a world entirely unfamiliar to him. A first approach in this sector took place in 1895, with the publication of Ciondolino, a children's novel that was a cross between scientific dissemination and a moralistic-pedagogical intent. But now his commitment in this sector is becoming more and more intense. This will be the furrow that he will progressively deepen and that will lead him, as one can easily guess, on the road to his masterpiece: Gian Burrasca.
Founded the "Sunday Journal"
Also noteworthy is the contribution of graphic designers and illustrators who embellish the periodical and which obviously cannot be cheap: 25 cents per issue, when a newspaper then cost 5 cents and sometimes even less, even 2 cents, just the rest of a cigar that it cost 8. And a Bolognese newspaper was born on this very intuition!
Gian Burrasca was born
It was in this weekly that the adventures of Gian Burrasca appeared in installments between 1907 and 1908.
However, the circulation of the weekly did not take off, despite the fact that in those years we were in a period of poverty, but certainly better than the past or at least as we had never seen before. In short, these were the Giolitti years in which a few more trifles, but not that much, could be done, and as Renato Serra also recognized in one of his famous speeches, the book market was growing and books, in some way, were being sold.
But the readers of the "Giornalino" are always few. The decisive blow came from 1908 onwards when the "Corriere dei piccoli" was born, with similar but not identical characteristics, and at a price that was in any case less than half: 10 cents. After three years of difficult and stunted survival, Vamba's "newspaper" was forced to close, like many others previously.
The commitment on the side of the boys continues
However, our very active author does not lay down his pen, on the contrary he continues his work undeterred, always on the youth sector, publishing books of historical and scientific dissemination, of fictional history and texts for elementary schools. He continues to try to shape young people to make them aware and responsible citizens.
The enthusiasm for D'Annunzio's feat in Fiume
A sob of enthusiasm will creep into his heart as a result of D'Annunzio's feat in Fiume, when it seems to him that by some spell those values in which he had deeply believed and for which he had spent his entire life have re-emerged, including that for the right national needs, not to be confused with the imperialist ones, of Italy.
In this sense, articles and testimonies on that "bright" period remain in the pages of his "Giornalino", which began to appear again in Rome in December 1918. They are pieces of great enthusiasm for D'Annunzio's enterprise, who will personally invite him to go to Fiume and he will stay there for two months at the end of 1919.
Destiny would have it that Vamba died at the end of November 1920, when the experience of his reborn "Giornalino" was coming to an end (it would then start again in 1921 with another publisher) and in which D'Annunzio's feat in Fiume ended with the "Bloody Christmas".
Il Newspaper by Gian Burrasca in the meantime it had been published in volume in 1912 by the publisher Bemporad of Florence, and from the end of the XNUMXs it would have been printed by other major publishers, first and foremost Mondadori and Rizzoli. The book has reached very high circulations, for a total that is difficult to calculate, but in the order of a few million copies.
Cinema and TV also appropriate the novel
However, the television adaptation in eight episodes that Lina Wertmuller made in the mid-XNUMXs remains memorable, which kept the whole country glued to the small screen, with Rita Pavone in the role of the protagonist and music by Nino Rota.
Gian Burrasca a term entered into common use
With the vicissitudes of Giannino Stoppani, unable to accept the rules of behavior of adults and to understand their hypocrisy, Vamba represented the archetype of the naughty and a little mischievous boy, and he fully entered our language as well, so much that giamburrasca has become a term in common use, present in all the dictionaries of synonyms to indicate the mischievous, naughty and mischievous boy. In short, a term that thanks to him has become the heritage of our language.
Image: The cover of the "Corriere dei Piccoli" dedicated to Rita Pavone as Gian Burrasca in the successful television miniseries directed by Lina Wertmüller, broadcast on RAI TV in 1964-65. Music by Nino Rota.
