A schoolboy's diary of one year in a Turin classroom, with monthly stories his teacher reads aloud — the little Lombard scout, the drummer boy of Sardinia, from the Apennines to the Andes. De Amicis published "Cuore" in 1886 and it became the book of the new Italian nation, translated everywhere and read for seventy years. The patriotism is unembarrassed and the poverty in the margins is exactly observed. Fifteen paintings of peasant mothers, mountain bagpipers, and lake crossings by Segantini and Leibl carry the same northern Italian light the monthly stories do.
