Il Giornalino di Gian Burrasca: trajectories of memory from the literary text to filmic mediations

The famous Giornalino di Gian Burrasca [The Diary of Gian Burrasca], written and illustrated between 1907 and 1908 by Vamba (the pen name of Luigi Bertelli) for the readers of the weekly children’s magazine “Il Giornalino della Domenica”, remains engraved in the contemporary collective memory thanks to the catchy chorus of Viva la pappa col pomodoro by Nino Rota – the theme song of the TV series adaptation directed by Lina Wertmuller for RAI and screened over December 1964 and January 1965 (Grasso, 2019; Morandini, 2019) – more so than to the original literary masterpiece for children. The progressive development of the multifaceted culture industry – spanning children’s magazines, which are living voices of their time but also constructors of imaginaries; the cinema, a true dream machine; and finally, television, with its all-pervasive power to enter the homes of Italians – has prompted the definition of new spaces of historiographical inquiry into representations of schools, teachers, and students, all of which are prone to change over time (Yanes, Cabrera et al., 2017). Within this research domain, the aim of the present study is to analyse the successive layers of change interwoven and deposited around Vamba’s diary-format work. Initially published serially in a children’s magazine, Gian Burrasca came out in novel form in 1912, and the story became increasingly well known, thanks to the success of the book and to the 1943 film adaptation directed by Sergio Tofano with screenplay by Cesare Zavattini (Boero, 2008), followed by the more famous and popular television production of 1964-1965 and the later republication of extracts from the original novel in the children’s magazine “Corriere dei Piccoli”. Thus, the text’s history has followed a dynamic, circular trajectory, progressively offering readers the outcomes of the new communicative material being added along the way. Indeed, the “Corriere dei Piccoli” version reproduces frames from the TV series, narrates the portions of the text that are the most ironic and display the greatest irreverence towards institutions, especially school, and contributes to expanding the filmic message by incorporating it into the iconic language of the illustrator, Giovanni Mosca. Analysing the process whereby the text was written and rewritten, via shifts from one code of communication to another, will allow us to describe how the space of the imaginary and of collective memory has been constructed (Alfieri, 2019), and how the many new elements introduced have modified understandings of the past, transmitting from each generation to the next a representation of school and of the relations between pupils, teachers, and school principals that is dynamic and ever open to new interpretations.