About the Author

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Edmondo de Amicis was born in Piedmont in 1846, 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 hadthrough his novel s central place on the school syllabusa formative influence on the written language of modern Italy."