Children’s periodicals have long been a tool of patriotic propaganda, not least during the great military clashes of the twentieth century. In his 1976 study, Claudio Carabba documented how bourgeois Italy’s biggest children’s weekly, Il Corriere dei Piccoli, was long used by first the liberal ruling classes and then the Fascist regime to speak to children. Yet rather less attention has been paid to the use made of similar periodicals by left-wing parties. Standing out among these, in the Italian case, was Il Pioniere, a Communist-inspired children’s comic edited in the 1950s by Dina Rinaldi and Gianni Rodari.

The history of progressive periodicals for children had in fact begun much earlier. As early as 1907, the anarchist Leda Rafanelli published the pamphlet Contro la Scuola (Against School), in which she attacked compulsory education as a bourgeois tool to maintain cultural hegemony over the popular classes by disseminating values of obedience and respect for established authority. Rafanelli invited her comrades to expose the lies of the bourgeoisie by printing books and periodicals which would aim progressive-inspired moral teachings at children.

From then on, a growing number of children’s periodicals were produced, such as Vittorio Podrecca’s monthly illustrated Primavera (Spring) — closed upon the outbreak of World War I — and Italo Toscani’s weekly Il Germoglio (The Seedling). This latter was founded at the end of the war to serve as a link between the children’s circles driven by the Italian Socialist Youth Federation, which sought to promote the “formation of socialist consciousness” through “propaganda readings.”