Paola Carrara Lombroso and picture postcards as educational products: A way to educate young readers and citizens of tomorrow

Abstract

In Italy picture postcards were disseminated during the Giolitti era and throughout the Great War, thus becoming a concrete medium with a pervasive potential. Postcards influenced mass culture by constructing a collective imagination, they promoted the education of adults as well as of young people. As postcards reflected the shape of cultural industry by reproducing large scale images, they stemmed from a complex productive process that became a language of its own, starting from the artistic originality of the image to the printed form, reaching a wider audience both in terms of visual education and as swift communicative tool. In 1909 in Corriere dei Piccoli (1908-1995), the most prominent magazine for children in Italy at the time, Paola Carrara Lombroso (1871-1954) began the project for Bibliotechine per le scuole rurali (Libraries for rural schools), destined to a success until halfway through the Twentieth century. The young readers of the magazine took part with initiative by colouring and selling postcards created by Italian artists. The sum raised was used to donate books to rural schools. This research wishes to analyse a sample of postcards illustrated by well-known artists such as Mussino, Golia, Altara, Bologna and Gugù in order to shed light on the way childhood was represented. Toys, books, expressions and clothes are visual evidence of the multiple perspectives that adults adopted to reach children through entertainment. The artist’s gaze met child readers as they became protagonists and at the same time owning that message by modelling their thought and imagination.