Piccolo Mondo by Fanny Romagnoli and Silvia Albertoni: a study on production, circulation, materiality and content (1901-1938)

ABSTRACT Between the last two decades of the 19th century and the first three of the 20th, it is possible to find signs of distribution and circulation of Italian books among immigrants and their descendants. This article aims to understand the production and circulation of reading books by Fanny Romagnoli and Silvia Albertoni, authors of Piccolo Mondo, approved to be adopted in elementary schools on the Peninsula and in Italian schools in Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century, and then analyze one of the volumes, the Sillabario, intended for first-class use. Anchored in the contributions of the History of Education and Cultural History and having the documental analysis as the adopted procedure, the present text takes as a privileged source the Piccolo Mondo reading book, in addition to Ministerial Circulars, a biobibliographic dictionary and newspapers. It also operates with the transnational category as a methodological approach in the History of Education. Books are considered cultural artifacts that are situated in the articulation between the prescriptions imposed by official programs and the unique discourses of teachers. For the process of internalizing the idea of the Italian Nation, a political-pedagogical project capable of bringing together the notions of nation, state and moral education in a single virtuous process was necessary. It can be said that Piccolo Mondo joined the project of creating a “new man”, a citizen of a Nation capable of leading the Nation to the conquest of modernity.