Sergio Tofano’s Kids: on the trail of a poetics for children through multiple languages of art

Abstract

The great diffusion of Sergio Tofano’s children’s work (1886 – 1973) through theatrical activities and children’s publications made him enter in the collective imagination of three generations of Italians, from the first post-war period to the first decades of the Republic. Reconstructing part of this relationship between the author and his readers with the help of some historical documents preserved at the Genovese Museo Biblioteca dell’Attore, the reasons of this link are investigated by examining the literary specificity of his production, placed in the furrow of the Italian comic humorous tradition. A researching field that is still not very popular with respect to his long and multifaceted activity, whose artistic depth allows him to be indicated among the forerunners of the historic passage from the Deamicisian aesthetic horizon to the Rodarian one and, in some cases, seems to anticipate an idea of childhood that more later will also affect new educational practices.