Telephone Tales (Favole al Telefono) is a book published in 1962 and written by Gianni Rodari (1920-1980). He was a writer, a journalist, and a teacher in an elementary school, whose main focus has always been childhood literature. As a matter of fact, “his books combine the happiness of fantastic and humorous invention with pedagogical intent”.
Gianni Rodari is one of the most beloved authors in Italy and almost every kid has read at least one of his books. He won the Hans Christian Anderson Award in 1970 and is broadly considered as Italy’s most important children’s author of the 20th century. He lived through World War II but was exempted from military service due to his delicate health status and decided to focus on reading philosophical and political books.
Once the war was over, he started writing for the Italian communist party daily newspaper called Unità. In 1950, the party relocated Rodari to Rome where he oversaw a weekly publication for kids, called Pioniere, and he also started publishing books. Since he has lived under the Fascist dictatorship for twenty-three years, the theme of most of his stories is basically an exhortation not to be a fascist.
Telephone Tales was first published in Italy in 1962 and it is a “collection of children’s stories intended to be short enough that one could be read during a 20th-century pay phone call. […] It is also unapologetically political, using unlikely situations and imaginary worlds to prompt readers to question the status quo”.
Telephone Stories is made of many different short stories - seventy stories to be more precise - and each one has the exact length that allows it to be told during a single phone call. In fact, the idea revolves around the occurrence that Mr. Bianchi, an accountant who often travels for work, calls his daughter every night at nine o’clock, regardless of where he is, to tell her a bedtime story. But, since in the 20th century pay phones were used, each single story had to fit in with the precise time frame of a phone call.
Every story takes place in a different place and at a different time, presenting unconventional characters and a beautiful bond between reality and fantasy. For example, it can be an old man getting a ride on a carousel which is really loved by children just to understand why that is the case and he finally gets it while he sails above the world or it can be a land where you meet butter men and roads are paved with chocolate or it’s a young shrimp who courageously tries to do things differently.
Despite his great success and popularity in Italy, Gianni Rodari’s work took a long time to reach the United States and it did so precisely with Telephone Stories. The masterpiece was translated into English - on the centenary of Rodari’s birth - thanks to a small publishing house in Brooklyn, called Enchanted Lion, which published the first English edition of the book. For this act, the publishing house received the Mildred L Batchelder Award from the American Library Association, the literary prize that recognizes the book as the most extraordinary one in that year. Furthermore, Rodari’s book is allegedly one of the books that have been donated the most to public libraries within the annual project “Why I read”.
The Italian Cultural Institute in Washington created a series of videos about this book and presented it during the week of the Italian language in the world.
Beginning from his very first years as a teacher, Gianni Rodari always had the utmost consideration for children’s education and made it the focus of his work. This interest of his can be traced back to the poverty he faced during his childhood; in fact, his dad was a baker who died when Rodari was nine years old and, as consequence, he was forced to start working to support his family and he did so by teaching in a local elementary school. Rodari deemed it very important that his students attended school and developed their imagination.