Edmondo De Amicis

Each month a school teacher narrates a new story to his students, with a moral in each of them.

A young Italian boy named Marco is devastated when his mother must leave home to work in Argentina to pay off the family debt. She sends the family letters, but soon the messages stop coming, which worries Marco and sets him off on an epic quest to find her.

A young boy travels by himself to reach his sick mother.

A young woman arrives in her school where she must teach for the first time. Her task consists in teaching a class of adults to read and write. All her students are male, ranging from boys to old men, and they are rather rowdy and difficult. All the more as a young hooligan dares write her on a test paper that he loves her. Feeling harassed by the young man, she is defended by other students. But she more or less feels the young bad boy's love is true and when this one is lying on his dying bed, after being stabbed by the other students, she solaces him by kissing him tenderly.

A number of different segments taken from 19th century Italian stories.

A young student of an upper-class background who is surrounded by classmates that are of working-class backgrounds, after a novel in diary format by Enrico Bottini.