L’Alpe 8 - Bambini di montagna

The children of the mountain. Even about Alpine childhood there are many prejudices to dispel. For example, it is not true that mountain children, children of poor and sometimes malnourished people, were more ignorant than those from the plains. On the contrary, teaching in the high valley schools was often superior to that of the lower valleys, and the mountains exported education and knowledge. And what about free time and the carefree games of childhood? Perhaps the children of the mountains had more fun with goats than with toys, becoming shepherds at a very young age, but in Val Gardena, which is a typically Alpine valley, toys were already being built on a semi-industrial scale in the 19th century to export them across half of Europe. The English traveler Amelia B. Edwards was astonished when she found the magical rocking horse of her childhood there. What childhood in the Alps? While child labor decreases, the burden on children caused by the concentration of the tourism phenomenon increases. The notable and the poor man: The exceptional autobiography of Ulrich Braker, a little goat herder, compared with that of Thomas Platter. Emil Brunner's mission. During the Second World War a Swiss photographer collected over 1700 childhood portraits in the valleys of his mountains. The Valley of Toys. Thanks to a trip to the Alps, a nineteenth-century writer discovers that the toys of her childhood are made in Val Gardena. We were born adults. The time for games for the children of Val di Fassa was short. Very often the little ones were called to play a productive role. Look, I'll send you to the chimney sweep! The phenomenon of "black emigration" exploded in the second half of the 19th century and continued until the twentieth century, from the Canavese area to the Trentino valleys. Separate desks. In the twenty years, fascism suppressed the German language in South Tyrol. Then the Katakombenschulen, catacomb schools, were born. What if there were no more mountains? In 2002, 114 students from the Aosta Valley were asked to react to a provocation: "You wake up and there are no more mountains around you...". The virtuous Alpine education. The idea of the educational Alp was born from a synthesis between the values of Risorgimento Italy, secular and liberal, and the philanthropic gaze of humanitarian socialism. Peaks for childhood. Raising children to the values of heights: in the boundless Alpine literature, children's publishing finds a significant space. Heidi: the universal myth of the mountain. In just over 120 years Heidi has become a planetary myth, making universal the values and stereotypes typical of the jealous and autarchic Swiss Alpine civilization. Children in the snow: the mountain game. In the "goose game" of a hundred years ago you can "read" the playful discovery of the winter mountains.