Insegnare al principe di Danimarca

The new, enlarged edition with two previously unpublished chapters of a poetic book capable of narrating the starkest reality in limpid pages that excite and move. Stories of children attending a special school in the working-class and populous districts of Naples, and of those who take care of them.

It was since the time of Lettera a una professoressa (Letter to a teacher) that we had not read such moving pages. As then, we are talking about children attending a special school, and their carers. We are not in the exile of a parsonage in Mugello, here, but in popular and populous neighbourhoods of Naples where the System is in force; the chronicles like to call them ‘the triangle of death’. The author, Carla Melazzini, is, in writing as in life, completely alien to rhetoric and easy indulgence. Thus, emotion, intelligence and poetry are in this book with the dry naturalness with which a wonderful flower can emerge from the crack in a ruined wall. Without being complacent about the idea that ruin is necessary for flowers, and is redeemed by them. You will find flowers in these pages, and flower boys, and also ruins. One we anticipate here is a fake tulip, as told – except for a few spelling mistakes – by a little girl who had failed second grade: ‘Once upon a time there was a flower that did not want to be a flower, so the flower fairy said: “If you want to become a human being, I will satisfy you, but if you don’t like it, you will have to resign yourself because you can no longer be a flower”. The flower agreed and the flower fairy touched it with her wand and transformed it into a human being. The flower realised that life was difficult. The fairy then made it into a fake tulip, so that it would not die, then it disappeared forever’. Carla asked a classmate: ‘What do you think Concetta meant by her story?’. ‘That the flower did not want to die and so the fairy made it immortal’. ‘But she turned it into a fake tulip! Is it better to be a human and die or to be a fake flower and never die?’ ‘It is better to die. In this new edition, in addition to Claudio Giunta’s Note, two chapters are added from the author’s unpublished papers: one on terrorism seen through the eyes of children, the other on the ‘belly of Naples’, with interviews and direct observations.