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made entirely of Parmesan cheese; its inhabitants spend their days preparing ravioli and macaroni, which they cook in capon broth. When these doughy delights are thrown down the slopes, the lucky individual who retrieves “the most of them, the most he eats.” Nearby flows a stream of Vernaccia wine, “the best that ever was drunk.” 62 The gallery of characters seeking free food would not be complete without at least a passing mention of such Commedia dell’Arte masks as Harlequin and Pulcinella, whose stage life is dominated by the grumblings of their empty stomachs and the need to secure food by outwitting masters and innkeepers alike.
    These examples bespeak a long-standing preoccupation or fear that had marked peasant life since the Renaissance days of Ruzante, 63 and had by Artusi’s time become the daily experience of the urban working classes as well. It was a tragedy of vast proportions that the very limited strength of incipient workers’ movements seemed incapable of taming. Hunger, poverty, and injustice were everywhere in the streets of Italy, as well as in Italian literature, of the end of the nineteenth century: in Pirandello’s
I vecchi e giovani
, 64 a novel of epicdimensions, significantly poised between Roman political corruption and the brutal military crushing of a miners’ rebellion known as the
Fasci siciliani
(1894); in Giovanni Verga’s
Per le vie
, a collection of short stories focusing on the life of the Milanese working class; 65 and in books such as Edmondo De Amicis’s
Cuore
(1886), another work whose popular appeal survived various political transformisms, two world wars, and a depression. 66
    Structured as the personal diary of a boy attending the last year of elementary school (and thus compulsory education),
Cuore
focuses on episodes involving children from different social classes: some will continue to study and become doctors, lawyers, politicians, professors; others will learn a trade and disappear from the protagonist’s horizon. All of them, however, are summoned to gestures of exceptional abnegation, in defense of motherland, family, and other “peculiar” values such as honesty and unselfishness. In recent years, the tales of these little heroes of the bourgeoisie, working class, and urban sub-poletariat have been frightfully castigated by “smart” critics who have chosen to show how impudently paternalistic and pathetic the author really was, not realizing, perhaps, that De Amicis had already ravaged his own writing, describing it as a kind of “watered-down Manzonianism, bereft of any courageous statements; a perpetual see-sawing between I believe and I don’t believe; a desire to make something heard without compromising it with words; a double-edged fear of making misbelievers laugh and upsetting the pious people; a constant catching of the heart by surprise, when it is the head that should be surprised instead.” 67
    Quite revealing, of course, is the distinction between heart and head, and the deliberate and, judging from his other works, reluctant choice De Amicis made in favor of the former: “Show me you are good-hearted boys; our class will be like a family,” implores schoolteacher Perboni upon meeting his class on the first day of school. Whatever our take on the book, there is enough poverty in it to convince readers of all persuasions that, even when not explicitly referred to, hunger must be close by.
    Distressing signs of penury are certainly not the exclusive legacyof fictional narratives. In accounting for the dissemination of Artusi’s book, which was “especially brisk among the bourgeoisie,” Professor Camporesi reminds us that the success of the book “could be called class-oriented” and that “Venetian farmers continued to eat their polenta and southern workmen continued to eat olives, fava beans, and tomatoes unaware that things were changing at the tables of other Italians.” 68
    The scarcity of food and the poor nutritional value