Most children begin to learn how to read and write when they first enter elementary school at the age of six. Having learned how to read at two, I had a four year head start advantage. Four years are an eternity in childhood and I had filled it by reading a large number of books.
There are some that I remember fondly from the early days of my reading adventures. My parents were very careful in the choice of children books: they wanted to be sure to maximize the amount of learning that could be derived from any given book. They were selected for cultural as well as political content.
A very beautiful one was called "The island of the magic squares" and it also marked my first introduction to Art. The book was a fairytale cleverly concocted out of a juxtaposition of paintings by Paul Klee.
I myself was inspired to try some artistic creations. My parents, who among other things Architects ended up doing for a living have been often working in graphic design, had all sorts of material one could dream of, colors, brushes, paint. Soon all the walls in our apartment, up to the height of about three feet, were covered by my frescoes, resembling more Pollock than Klee. Every once in a while, when I had exhausted all the available space on the walls, they would pass a coat of white paint over everything and I was ready to start again.
I had another book with interesting artistic connection, an anti-war booklet meant for older children, illustrated by the anarchist painter Enrico Baj, full of his grotesque generals in uniform and gloomy images of nuclear war.
Some more of my early readings included a beautiful series of three books, "Jungle", "Prehistoric World", and "Pirates" that my father found for me. They contained a good deal of information, presented as an succession of short essays, poems, and artistic drawings, along with a series of simple games I could do on my own, from constructing a cardboard model of a prehistoric fish, to recognizing and reproducing footprints of various animals, to building model pirate vessels out of cereal boxes.
Books were people talking to me. They were the door to the world. Being an only child of working parents, at least until the time when I was old enough to roam the streets with other kids, books were my closest friends.
I slowly moved into more demanding readings, those without illustrations, written in small type and bound in small pocket format, in other words, those that are not meant to catch the eye of children. By the time I started going to school I was already in the habit, which I am still following now, of never leaving home without having at least a book in my pocket.
So, when I finally went to school, in the period while others were still struggling to distinguish one letter of the alphabet from another, I was making my first tentative steps in reading Voltaire, at first with my mother's help, soon on my own.
I understood it perfectly that the other children were just as intelligent and talented as I, but for some reason they had been deprived of a whole four years of education. Even with my adult understanding, I still don't get it why a simple and fundamental learning process is delayed by so much: at an early age the plasticity of a child's brain is enormous, learning how to read is a simple task, the simpler the sooner it is done.
I was bored and restless at school. I wouldn't get it that pupils were supposed to sit at their desks and as soon as I was bored with what was going on, which was very soon, I just shot off to somewhere else in the room and started playing some games on my own. This didn't go down well with the discipline of a conservative school and it was immediate open war between me and the "authorities".
Even though school was not the exciting adventure I had envisioned, something remarkable happened around that time. My mother began to spend a lot more time with me than she had ever done before. I felt as if I had undergone a rite of passage and I was finally worthy of her full attention.
