1. Food and identity in Carlo Collodi's Il viaggio per l'Italia di Giannettino.
- Author
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Pagani, Andrea
- Subjects
ITALIANS ,TEXTBOOKS ,MATERIAL culture ,LOCAL foods ,CHILDREN'S literature ,FOOD preferences - 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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