Fiabe di corpi narranti. La poetica pedagogica della differenza

The fairy-tale filter, often, acts as a ‘pedagogical wideangle’ and allows to amplify the educational value and the framing spectrum of things and people. When Hans Christian Andersen, in the heart of the Nineteenth century, plotted the storyline of his touching narratives, he started from an unavoidable and ‘perceptible’ data: the body of the little protagonists. Whether it was humans, objects, animals, the fairy-tale narrating device consisted in the rejection of the so-called normality; a bodily eccentricity that turned out to be a deposit of suffering, a forge of hope, a waiting horizon and a bastion of resilience.
At the beginning of the following century, Guido Gozzano proposed this ‘corporeal poetic of the story’, sublimating it in the ethereal and elusive shades of enchantment: Piumadoro and Piombofino, Nevina and Fiordaprile are, in this regard, two emblematic fairy tales that tell of irresolvable opposites, disillusioned perspectives and courageous challenges that only the childhood of every epoch can face and support.