No other children’s newspaper in Europe, and perhaps in the world, can boast such longevity as the newspaper, the weekly magazine for children created by the blessed Don Giacomo Alberione, founder of the Society of Saint Paul, whose first issue came out on 1 October 1924. When Alberione chose the mission for his Congregation to spread the Gospel with “modern means of communication”, he started with the little ones, and only in 1931 did he create the magazine for adults Christian family. Alberione wrote: «Writing for children is a singularly difficult art. In addition to requiring a special vocation, it also requires adequate preparation and wise activity in the apostle.” The first issues were monthly, had eight pages, were printed in two colours, the subscription cost 5 lire and were very confessional and not very journalistic. After the war, the newspaper changed its appearance, it became colourful, with a larger format, attentive to current affairs and sport, and the illustrated rhyming stories were gradually replaced by comics.
It was Don Tommaso Mastrandrea, who directed it from 1976 to 1999, who gave the definitive turning point to the weekly, making it a point of reference for the greatest cartoonists of the time and bringing it to a circulation of 200 thousand copies. At his side the journalist Enzo Crocetti, who dedicated his entire professional life to the Newspaper. He arrived in 1968 chosen by Don Zilli as editorial secretary, and then became a trainee and gradually acquired increasingly more responsible roles, until concluding his career in 2004 as deputy director of the then director Don Antonio Tarzia.
«There was great attention in the drafting of the texts», recalls Enzo Crocetti. «Readers inundated us with avalanches of letters with the most varied requests, for them we had the same role that Google now has. For decades I responded to the most loved column, Ask Uncle Gioa sort of Wikipedia where I had to answer the strangest questions. It took me hours to search for information, browsing through paper archives and encyclopedias, but for me it was a source of great satisfaction to know, even if anonymously, that I was an important reference for millions of boys and girls.”
Another great intuition of Mastrandrea was the creation of Get to know togetherfirst detachable inserts then in the form of cards to collect and then again files on every topic of human knowledge, the basis for thousands of scholastic research in which signatures such as Enzo Biagi, Indro Montanelli, Fulco Pratesi, Ambrogio Fogar, Piero Bianucci… In the Newspaper of the eighties and nineties, what we could define as the golden times, there were also columns held by football champions; Giacinto Facchetti, Antonio Cabrini, Paolo Maldini, even Michel Platinthe. And for a few years, in collaboration with the speakers, the magazine organized a tournament, the “Scrabble Cup”.
But the highlight of the weekly were comic stories, with some of the most important designers and screenwriters on the Italian scene, from Franco Caprioli to Dino Battaglia, from Lino Landolfi to Jacovitti, from Sergio Toppi to Gianni De Luca. Among the symbolic characters of the weekly we remember the photojournalist rabbit Pinky by Massimo Mattioli and the little angel Pallino designed by Roberto Rinaldi. Il Giornalino has also hosted cartoon celebrities: from the Smurfs, to Yogi, from the Ninja to the Winx…
And so far it’s history: the future is still to be written.
