Thesis title: Italo Calvino e la scuola: il mestiere di scrivere, la sfida di leggere
With the 1962 reform of the middle school, which extended compulsory education in Italy to the age of fourteen and renewed curricular programs, the Italian publishing world entered a period of great ferment. Italo Calvino, despite writing little about school, became involved as a reader, publishing professional, and author: he edited the school editions of Il barone rampante and Marcovaldo for Einaudi, and contributed to the creation of the anthology La lettura for Zanichelli. This study examines these three projects through a careful reconstruction of their historical, editorial, and cultural contexts, and on the basis of the extensive documentation preserved in the archives of the two publishers. Such materials attest to the complex process of preparation and the fruitful collaboration within the editorial teams. Each text is analyzed both in its specific features and in comparison with other versions intended for audiences different from that of students. The variety and precision of Calvino’s interventions reveal a rigorous and coherent commitment: through cuts, revisions, annotations, and structural reorganizations designed for young readers, the author activates all the potentialities of the text, expressing – in clear and essential terms – his deepest idea of writing and reading. The former is an artcraft to be acquired and refined through experience; the latter, an active and formative practice, but above all a critical exercise that challenges readers to confront ambiguity, doubt, and paradox. Two ‘certainties’ underlie this approach: first, that the foundation of every ‘lesson’, according to Calvino, lies in those “few but irreplaceable” things that only “literature can seek out and teach”; and second, that transmitting them to new generations represents a meaningful expression of the writer’s intellectual engagement.