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But who is Heidi?

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For a few weeks we have been talking about little Heidi; but who was she and how was her myth born? Perhaps - before moving on to tell the lives and choices of her new heirs - it is interesting to stop and understand her story.

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Our little protagonist was certainly an inhabitant of a valley at the end of the 1885th century and was certainly a survivor. A demographic survey carried out between 1884 and 230 in the valleys of Trentino reveals that out of a thousand children born alive, XNUMX died within the first year. Hers was a world that had always remained the same, with a very poor capacity for innovation: a closed and self-regulating Alpine universe, as if frozen in ice.

A world far from the idyllic images presented by its author, Johanna Spiry who, through the simplification of the message and the narrative scheme, has created a myth that can be read and appreciated in the languages ​​of four continents.

 

The little protagonist does not bring messages of redemption and liberation but simply embodies the stereotype of the good shepherdess trusting in God who grew up with the milk of sheep and the pure water of glaciers. (A model far removed from our little revolutionary!) The story of Heidi, in the wake of eighteenth-century literature, is based on the contrast between the virtuous mountain and the vicious city. The eighteenth century was in fact the key century for the construction of the Alpine stereotype: it did not only represent the superiority of the Capitals over the suburbs, and therefore of the city over the mountain but it was also the century of the Enlightenment and Romantic discovery of the Alps. The creator of Heidi does nothing but apply the myth born a hundred years earlier and is inspired by the fantastic journeys between hills and glaciers of which every intellectual has left at least one ode or a fragment of a diary. The protagonist of the novel represents the pure and enchanted soul of nature in contrast to the culture of the rich family of Klara, the sad city girl - Heidi's bourgeois alter ego - confined to a wheelchair for years. Behind the happy ending, one condition remains immutable: the poverty of the mountain in contrast to the wealth (including intellectual) of the city. In short, the mountain is recognized for its moral virtues but political and economic supremacy remains firmly in the hands of the city.

And it is from here – with our journey to the highlands – that we want to continue our journey and discover who, far from stereotypes and postcard images, is trying to create a new economy.