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This is a beautiful edition published by Armando Curcio Editore in 1955. The adaptation is by Giuliana M. Poppi and the illustrations, by Gaetano Proietti, reflect the style of fifties. The design of the picture is very geometric and the colours, three or four for plate, are spread in large and homogeneous areas without shades. In the full-page and full-colour plates, the design has a geometric style but the colours are spread with light and shade that give volume and depth without providing a realistic effect.
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This precious booklet is part of a book series published by Salani in the early thirties. The collection, dedicated to the youngest reader, entitled "I Grandi Piccoli Libri" faithfully reproduces the English book series of "The Teeny Weeny Book" published in the same years by Oxford University Press. The text is an adaptation that presents only the main episodes. I have unfortunately not yet been able to find out the illustrator's name despite my long research. All the illustrations are black and white and imitate the style, in a simplified manner, of the English illustrator A.E. Jackson of whom appears a color plate depicting the scene "La strana Merenda"** at the beginning of the booklet. The first edition of this book dates back to 1932. My copy was published in 1933 and presents several posthumous interventions with watercolour and crayon. Definetly a young budding artist who thought to embellish the book did it.
For all the information about this book, the precious help and availability I would like to thank: Valentina Paggi, Giorgio Bacci, the 'Archivio Salani and Charlie Lovett.
* "The Big Little Books"
** "A Mad Tea Party"
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For all those who wonder who was the first in Italy to give a face to Alice, here is the first Italian edition of Alice in Wonderland illustrated by an Italian artist: Riccardo Salvadori. The book is not dated but was published in 1913 by the Istituto Editoriale Italiano. The translation is by Silvio Spaventa Filippi, curator of the "Biblioteca dei Ragazzi" series of which this book is a part. The peculiarity of this volume is that it not only presents for the first time the Italian translation of Alice Through Looking-Glass but that this is put before the adventures in wonderland. Riccardo Salvatori's boards are very elegant and refined. The illustrator, however, did not attempt a new and personal interpretation, but he was strongly inspired, in some cases almost copied, by the style and the layout of the illustrations of the English colleague Arthur Rackham. I do not think it is a manifestation of little courage, but rather a testimony that the illustration of children's books in Italy at the beginning of the last century was strongly influenced by the British style. (An example of this is the Salani's book described above). The illustrations by Rackham had influenced many of the Italian illustrators of Alice at least until the 1950s.
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This is an edition published by the Bietti publishing house in 1974 with the translation by Adriana Crespi and the illustrations by Studio Lombardi. In one volume are presented both Alice's adventures, the one in Wonderland and the one through the looking-glass. The illustrations are in color and full page.The characters are reminiscent, in some cases, those of the feature film by Walt Disney released in 1951.
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This edition, published in 1992 by Sonda publishing house with the illustrations by Pia Valentinis, is particularly dear to me. I discovered this volume several years ago, during the College period, in a library for young people in Terni, while I was doing research for final dissertation. Unfortunately, this library does not exist anymore, and I regret it because I often went there during the high school years. My classmate Silvia an I usually went before the Italian literature test; we studied together to better prepare ourselves for the test, but then our studying turned into long chats about literature... so in short we played to be "intellectuals".
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