2024 Winner

Matteo Lazzari

We’re excited to announce the winner of the sixth Carla Poesio Award, recognizing an outstanding Italian thesis on children’s literature.

The jury selected five finalists from nineteen submissions, sent in by universities throughout Italy. We present the shortlist below, in alphabetical order:

  • Lisa Adlerstein, Voci e atmosfere da un mondo scomparso. La letteratura per l’infanzia di Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • Chiara Bottaro, Poesia e infanzia. Incontro e rispecchiamento
  • Arcangela Dicesare, Mosche sulla lingua. Tra infanzia e disgusto           
  • Dario Donadello, MITOLOGENDO. Un progetto sperimentale di educazione intergenerazionale alla lettura su e con la mitologia greca          
  • Matteo Lazzari, “L’Israel dei bambini”: storia di un periodico per bambini nell’Italia del dopoguerra (1949-1952) e la collaborazione al giornalino di Emanuele Luzzati      

And the winner is… Matteo Lazzari, with “L’Israel dei bambini”: storia di un periodico per bambini nell’Italia del dopoguerra (1949-1952) e la collaborazione al giornalino di Emanuele Luzzati

The jury’s rationale:

“In his thesis for a Primary Education Sciences degree, Matteo Lazzari reconstructed the forgotten story of “L’Israel dei bambini”, a periodical conceived by a group of men and women who miraculously escaped Nazi-fascist persecution. The thesis is titled: “L’Israel dei bambini”: storia di un periodico per bambini nell’Italia del dopoguerra (1949-1952) e la collaborazione al giornalino di Emanuele Luzzati, defended at the University of Milano-Bicocca in the academic year 2021-2022. Lazzari exhaustively reconstructs post-war Italian history and culture via this Ferrara-based fortnightly publication, at long last giving it the aesthetic, pedagogical, political, and civil resonance it so richly deserves. Drawing on high-level critical/comparative skills and rigorous philological analysis, Lazzari’s methodological approach reconstructs the almost hitherto-unknown iconographic creative journey of Emanuele Luzzati, the undisputed star of this valuable research.”

With BolognaFiere support, in 2025 Matteo Lazzari’s thesis is coming out with Edizioni ETS.  

Matteo Lazzari

Matteo Lazzari

I was born in Zogno, a town in the province of Bergamo, in March 1977.
Raised among comics, cartoons, and dreams of becoming an archaeologist like Indiana Jones, I graduated as a surveyor, with aspirations for art and the theatre.
I enrolled in modern literature at the University of Milan, where I graduated with a thesis on the drawings of Lorenzo Lotto, under Professor Giovanni Agosti.
I began working in middle schools until, by chance, I was sent to cover a position at an elementary school. There, to my delight I discovered there’s so much you can do, even with “little ones”.
This inspired me to embark on the new challenge of enrolling in Primary Education Sciences at the University of Milano-Bicocca. I graduated under Professor Martino Negri.
Ah... and I’ve been working in elementary schools ever since that now-long-ago day of substitute teaching.

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