The second volume presents, alongside a very important book such as Un weekend postmoderno, all the essay materials related to the “Under 25 Project,” anticipator, in its design and theoretical lines, of an innovation related to reading and writing. Through this re-presentation it will be possible to fully re-evaluate Tondelli’s contribution to literary innovation, including from a theoretical and didactic approach of great importance that anticipated the theses proposed, for example, by Daniel Pennac. This is one of the great merits of Tondelli’s literary work, the demonstration of how much he did not want to be a talent-scout, but how he wanted to design, ahead of the times and trends, an innovative discourse on education in reading and writing. A lesson that is still of great interest to young people today, who follow him with great interest.

After all, the project is very well documented and full of references, especially to a book that counted for the formation of new critics and new writers in the 1980s, Peter Bichsel’s The Reader, the Narrator. On the theoretical basis of the book and his experience as a writer Tondelli set up a project that would help young people orient themselves in writing, focusing on the selection of topics to be addressed, readings that were able to offer new stimuli, and the most suitable communicative tools for structuring a story. Thus Tondelli’s project and entire educational function is based on the formulation of tools that would highlight how the possibility of storytelling had changed during the 1980s, that would succeed in clarifying what Peter Bichsel intuits as the need to “continue the tradition of storytelling, because we can sustain the test of our lives only by telling.” And another project, of dialogue through narratives, such as that of the magazine “Panta,” finds in Tondelli its most passionate supporter. He is the very one who became a symbolic writer of the 1980s, because he also sensed the changes in the cultural consumption of his own generation and somehow made a small revolution in restoring dignity (something that may be obvious today, but was not in the 1980s) to, for example, the genre novel (the Scerbanenco-style detective story, for example) or referring not only to literary traditions but also to new extraliterary languages such as music or comics.

In the section “The Writer’s Craft,” are collected for the first time the reading sheets, published gradually in “L’Espresso” and “Rockstar,” as well as prefaces and introductions to volumes by various authors. What emerges is a curious and unpublished “reading diary” that also outlines the curiosities and interests of the Tondelli reader. Finally, the final section offers a series of conversations, some never before published in a volume, chosen either for the particularity of the context or for the breadth of content covered.

Very interesting are the pages in which Tondelli lays bare his identity as a reader. Inviting young people to read for Tondelli was not a theoretical practice, but rather a concrete act, carried out through the pages of the newspapers he collaborated with from “Linus” to “Rockstar,” newspapers very close to the youth audience.

The critical slant does not suit Tondelli, although his sensitivity and relevance of reading denotes an unusual capacity for critical analysis. It is the attitude in approaching books that poses the difference. The book for Tondelli is not, first and foremost, a text to be examined: it is a container of stories and information to be experienced firsthand. Thus it can become an effective tool of literary reference precisely at the moment when it offers insights, literary structures to be verified in one’s own creative work. Tondelli first and foremost privileges the pleasure of reading, which involves various aspects: questioning the nature of the stories, referring to the details that strike him as a reader, paying attention to what can be called the “illuminations” to which literature can lead, and consequently on the inner growth that reading entails.