Favole al telefono

Very magical. I was wavering between a 4 and a 5, but “Giacomo di cristallo” (Crystal Giacomo) pushed this over into a 5.

Basically, this is a collection of very short “phone phables” (hee) for kids. I tested this on my 3 year old, and - for a book that had zero illustrations - my kid was pretty enchanted, and kept asking for more stories, and for clarifications on the stories which I read. For example: the story of the very distractible Giovanni, who loses his hand, his arm, his leg, his nose as he goes for a leisurely walk around the neighborhood. (My kid: “And his head? WHAT ABOUT HIS HEAD?”) Sure, this story SOUNDS horrifying to adult ears - reminiscent of the most unsettling scene in Looper (oh glob that scene) - but my kid was instead sternly fascinated.

Similarly: the girl who shrinks as she gets tired and ends up sleeping on her now-enormous pillow. That's the whole story. That's it. I really enjoyed, actually, how both absurd and sudden the endings would be. The cosmic chicken story was pretty good (and oddly moving). This is definitely a time capsule of 1960s sensibilities: WW2 and the horrors of fascism are still fresh, but, at the same time, there's a sense of Space Age wonder.

Giacomo di cristallo is the story of a little boy who was born transparent, and his thoughts could be seen like multi-colored fish swimming around his head. So he can't lie or keep secrets very well, heh, but shit really hits the fan with a fascist dictator takes over, and Giacomo can't pretend to be okay with it, so ends up getting pretty immediately imprisoned!

Hmm, other lovely images were the castle of gelato in the middle of Milan's Piazza Maggiore, and the little old lady asking for someone to find her a gelato couch with armrests, please. Also enjoyed the story of the boys eating their way down a road made of chocolate. I mean, yo, Italian food is good and is NOT to be trifled with.

There was a definite aspect of Grimm Bros-esque fantasticalness to all of the stories - distinct from the now-stodgy-seeming Anglo/American stories of going to school, enjoying school, doing circle time. PLEASE, kids in Italy are eating their way down chocolate avenues to gelato palaces, let's get with the program here.

The moralizing was mostly light, except for the occasional note on how fascism was a terrible idea and some “colonizing space”/brotherhood of man stuff. Honestly, I was very excited to read this to my kid, and I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly enchanting it was for them. This is like 71 stories! Good value for money too, haha.