Love and Gymnastics [antikvár]

On Love and Gymnastics by Edmondo De Amicis 'The house was well suited to intrigues and to the secrets of amorous passions': the space and the movement of the story are already given in this sentence. The passión of whose intrigues and secrets we are told is a passión for the feminine beauty, an athletic and domineering beauty - as in Wagner's Brunhilde and Baudelaire's giantess - of a teacher of gymnastics. This passión involves pretty much all the characters who have anything to do with her, but in particular a prudish, shy young man. The story is Love and Gymnastics, probably the íinest, and certainly the most humorous, malicious, sensual, and psychologically acute story that Edmondo De Amicis ever wrote. It was published, and I would be tempted to say concealed, in 1892, among the 'sketches and stories' of Fra Scuola e Casa (.Between School and Home), one of the volumes in which the author performed his official duty as an anecdotal chronicler and cheerleader for the efforts that the new Italy was making to give itself a national identity, through somewhat dour institutions such as the army and the educational system. But in Love and Gymnastics, this little world appears to be fraught, a field of opposing forces between the idealistic impulses of the civil missions and the pathological entanglements of individuals and their secret lives. On the one hand, we have the atmosphere of fervour that drives the minorities of state officialdom, thirsty for technical information and new ideas (in this case the battle for gymnastics to be taught in schools: the cultural model is Wilhelmine Germany, another young nation, and a promising ally for Italy in the Triple Alliance);