11 h 13 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What stays with us from childhood: a teacher, a classmate, or the wonder of a puppet show?
In Memories of Childhood and School, Edmondo De Amicis returns to the early years of life and the people who leave a mark. Teachers, schoolmates and the small pleasures of boyhood fill these short reflections. Rather than follow one long plot, the book invites you to linger over the experiences that help shape a grown person.
The classroom is more than a place for lessons. It is a small society where children discover friendship, rivalry, loyalty and fairness. Beyond school, the puppet theatre brings stories, jokes and drama to the street and square. De Amicis draws attention to these ordinary encounters and delights, inviting you to consider how much a child carries forward.
What you’ll discover
- The roots of character Consider childhood as the ground where a person's feelings and character begin to take shape.
- Teachers who leave traces Reflect on the lasting place teachers hold in memories of learning and growing up.
- Lessons between classmates Explore the friendship, rivalry and fairness children learn through their encounters with one another.
- The pull of puppets Discover the boyhood delight of puppet shows, where stories and jokes feed the imagination.
- Room to linger Enjoy short, gentle reflections that make space for the small joys of early life.
Who will love it
Readers who love warm memoirs, schoolday stories, Italian history seen through a boy's eyes, puppets, theater and the comic side of children will feel at home in this book.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A Piedmont boyhood shapes everything that follows
- Parents teach kindness by example, not sermons
- A boy loves soldiers and loses a friend
- School brings terror, comedy and some mercy
- The courtyard gang teaches him about people
- One enthusiasm after another fills his youth
- Italy's wars of liberation fill the classroom
- Books wake the writer and a sorrow ends childhood
- Later sketches turn his eye on dolls and children
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- Paperback
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
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- Large print hardcover
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Ricordi d'infanzia e di scuola in 25 languages, side by side, paragraph by paragraph, once the book texts are online: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Ricordi d'infanzia e di scuola
by Edmondo De Amicis · 1901
A boy in Cuneo chases soldiers, paints battles and sings off key, and carries his father's puppets to Turin.
Challenging10–20 hours to read25 languages
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In short
What does a man remember when he looks back at his childhood and schooldays? Edmondo De Amicis, the Italian writer, answers with a flood of scenes: a nurse crowned with fireflies, a corporal who marches off to the Crimean War, a teacher who pinches arithmetic into his pupils.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A Piedmont boyhood shapes everything that follows
The book opens with the author's earliest memory, a game on a pile of sand with a brother who dies when the author is four. The scene then widens to Cuneo, a small Piedmont town, where his Genoese father distributes salt and tobacco for the king. The house looks over a river, with a garden, vine pergolas and a courtyard where merchants' carts crowd in twice a week. Above it all stand the snowy Alps.
A comic detail shows how deeply a place enters a child. Born in Oneglia, the boy forgets his Genoese speech and learns the local dialect from servants and playmates. For a while he and his mother cannot follow each other, and a brother sometimes has to interpret their arguments.
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What is Memories of Childhood and School about?
It is Edmondo De Amicis's account of his boyhood in Cuneo and his schooldays, with his passions for soldiers, painting, singing and theater. Later sketches describe a doll shop, a puppet theater, kindergartens, children's essays and a duel.
Is Memories of Childhood and School a true story?
The childhood chapters are memoir, written by De Amicis as an older man about his own boyhood in Piedmont. The book also includes sketches from his later life and short stories, such as The Red Carnation.
Who are Martinotti and Maddalena?
Maddalena is the kind old servant who becomes a second mother to the author. Corporal Martinotti is a young bugler in the bersaglieri who befriends the boy and leaves with his battalion for the Crimean War.
The author
Edmondo De Amicis
1846–1908 · Italian novelist
Edmondo De Amicis was an Italian writer and journalist, born in Oneglia in 1846. He served as an army officer before turning to writing and lived in Turin. He wrote travel books and published Cuore in 1886. He died in Bordighera, Italy, in 1908.
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