The Birth of Italian Comics: Corriere dei Piccoli's 1908 Launch

The first Italian comic magazine, Corriere dei Piccoli, debuted on December 27, 1908, with a print run of 80,000 copies. The project was initiated by Paola Lombroso Carrara, daughter of criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who proposed the idea to Corriere della Sera director Luigi Albertini. However, direction was given to Silvio Spaventa Filippi, while Lombroso Carrara was assigned an anonymous reader correspondence column under the pseudonym 'Zia Mariù'. She left in 1912 due to ideological disagreements over the Italian invasion of Libya. The magazine featured early Italian comic characters: Bilbolbul by Attilio Mussino, and the first true Italian comic success, Quadratino by Antonio Rubino, launched in 1909. Rubino also created Pierino in 1909 and later contributed to the iconic Signor Bonaventura by Sergio Tofano (1917). In the post-war period, under director Guglielmo Zucconi, the magazine reached sales of 700,000 copies in the 1960s, featuring artists like Jacovitti (who debuted in 1968 with Cocco Bill fa 7+), Grazia Nidasio, and Hugo Pratt. The publication ended in 1995 after 4,504 issues.