The political thought of Vamba in the context of early 20th-century Italy: civic-ethical commitment and the project of educating new generations in citizenship

This contribution analyses the concept of nation elaborated and promoted by Luigi Bertelli (Vamba), with particular reference to his works for children and youth. In the early twentieth-century Italian cultural context, he was an important protagonist among the intellectual-patriots aiming to follow up the process of unification of the peninsula through the complete definition of a national identity. Vamba articulated and promoted a project of education in citizenship addressed to the new bourgeois generations, involving the recovery of the myths of the Risorgimento and the faith in the fathers of the country, which was always presented in a direct, irreverent and never boring style. Although using different means, Bertelli’s project flanked the one promoted through official educational channels, in providing the substratum of traditions and common values in which his audience could finally recognise themselves as Italian citizens.