«Chi può dire che il mondo sia vecchio e cattivo, finché vi nascono i bimbi?»: la narrativa per l’infanzia di Laudomia Bonanni

In 1948, when Laudomia Bonanni (1907–2002) finally garnered acclaim as a writer, she was thirty-nine years old, and her fame had never crossed the borders of her homeland, Abruzzo. However, she could already boast a long apprenticeship in children’s fiction. In 1928, she published “Il pesco vestito di rosa” and “Il canto dell’acqua”; in 1932, her two fables, ‘La casa delle mille sorelle’ and ‘Il grillo violinista,’ appeared in the weekly Il Popolo d’Abruzzo. Damina Celina e altri racconti was published in 1935 and followed by Men. Avventure al Nuovo Fiore, a children’s novel in a colonial setting, in 1939 and the fairy tale Le due penne del pappagallino Verzé in 1948. Other stories by Bonanni, published in the many magazines with which she collaborated on a regular basis, still await a thorough examination. Bonnani made herself economically independent when very young by teaching in remote villages in the mountains of Abruzzo, where poverty and underdevelopment were a bitter daily reality. Her long career as a primary school teacher was going to be an inexhaustible resource for her future works, especially those dedicated to childhood, which convey her profound intuition and her great love for children. This article analyses Bonanni’s writings by highlighting their innovative elements that set them apart from contemporaneous literary production, for example, her use of a magical surrealism, which approximates children’s freely unreal fantasies.