Cuore, meaning 'heart' in Italian, is the fictional diary of a young boy’s life in a Turin school. The narrator, Enrico, writes vividly of life in the classroom and in the local streets, portraying the achievements and setbacks, pleasures and pains of growing up in a late nineteenth-century Italian community. Enrico's journals are interspersed with letters from his parents encouraging him to be industrious, kind, honest, loyal and respectful. These exhortations are reinforced by stories about children whose selfless deeds demonstrate the patriotism, sense of duty and love of family to which the young Italian citizen should aspire. Written by a former professional soldier in the aftermath of the Italian war for independence and the Unification of Italy in 1870, de Amicis wrote the book with the intention of fostering an sense of Italian identity. Cuore has been adapted into almost every conceivable medium, including films, major television series, radio adaptations, plays and comic books. It has even become a cult anime film in Japan. From Henry Miller, who wrote a glowing monograph on the book, to world-famous tenor Andrea Bocelli, who composed a song about it, this account of childhood has inspired many and continues to do so to this day.

Edmondo De Amicis (1846–1908) was born in Piedmont, at a time when Italy lay dismembered. A soldier by profession, he spent much of his youth fighting for a united Italy. An admirer of the writer Alessandro Manzoni, who considered that Florentine should be the standard Italian language, he wrote only in Florentine Italian. With the huge success of Cuore he achieved his goal of having had – through his novel’s central place on the school syllabus– a formative influence on the written language of modern Italy.