One of Gianni Rodari’s short stories is set in a faraway land where the authorities are so meek that, when a visitor picks a forbidden flower, a police officer demands to be slapped across the face. The visitor refuses to comply with such a strange order — if anything, he says, it’s the police who should slap him — but the reader is left wondering if reality is any less absurd.

Rodari, a beloved children’s author in Italy who died in 1980, took state violence seriously. When he was a reporter for the Communist newspaper L’Unità, in 1950, he covered the police shooting of six unarmed men protesting for workers’ rights, and one of his early poems was about a child whose father was killed by the police.