Mobility narratives in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Italian literature for children reflect the dramatic conditions of vagrancy, abandonment and forced relocation, as well as the situation of child-labor exploitation and child trade through apprenticeship contracts. They also document experiences of mass emigration. In my essay I intend to: i) acknowledge that children’s conditions have been the object of an extensive multi-disciplinary debate in the 1800s and early 1900s; ii) briefly discuss the specifics of Italian children’s literature and the representation of young male mobility; iii) identify some recurring narrative patterns of female (im)mobility; iv) point to three specific narrative plots that relate the mobility of younger female characters to national-identity and national-development issues; v) analyze two of these narratives, Maria Messina’s Cenerella and Olga Visentini’s La zingarella e la principessina, which were written during or in the aftermath of World War I.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Caviglioli, R., (2025), "Minimal Departures: Narratives of Younger Female Mobility in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Italian Children’s Literature", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Caviglioli, Rita. "Minimal Departures: Narratives of Younger Female Mobility in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Italian Children’s Literature." Quaderni d'italianistica 35 (2): 2015. 125-138. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v35i2.23618. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.