Cuore: The Heart of a Boy (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works: European)

Representing the Huckleberry Finn of Italy, this is the most read classic in the country. Presented in the form of a diary, its subject is a young boy's life in Turin following Unification in 1870. The narrator, Enrico, writes vividly of school life and the bustling city of vegetable-sellers, chimney sweeps, and carpenters all around him. Like Huck Finn or Dickens, Cuore has been adapted into just about every conceivable medium—films, major television series, radio adaptations, plays, and even comic books. It is a set text on courses from University College London to Harvard and is even a cult classic in Japan in its incarnation as an anime film. From Henry Miller, who wrote a glowing monograph on the book, to world-famous tenor Andrea Bocelli, who wrote a song about it, this simple tale of childhood has inspired all kinds of people and continues to do so today.

Edmondo de Amicis was born in Piedmont in 1846, at a time when Italy lay dismembered. A soldier by profession, he spent much of his youth fighting for a united Italy. An admirer of the writer Alessandro Manzoni, who considered that Florentine should be the standard Italian language, he wrote only in Florentine Italian. With the huge success of Cuore he achieved his goal of having had—through his novel’s central place on the school syllabus—a formative influence on the written language of modern Italy.