As we know, Alice is an enterprising and curious little girl who travels often: the first time underground, falling into a well, and then emerging through a small door in Wonderland .

In a second journey, Through the looking glass , Alice discovers an upside-down world made up of bizarre characters who drag her along an apparently meaningless journey which proceeds according to the rules of the game of chess, up to the final triumph in which she is crowned queen.

Its creator Lewis Carroll had told these stories to his little "real" interlocutors (Alice Liddell and her friends), with many dialogues and many nursery rhymes, to then entrust the illustrations for the first printed editions - respectively in 1865 and 1872 – to a great English artist, John Tenniel.

Alice's first landing in Italy took place in 1872, precisely in Turin, when the publisher Loescher offered Alice in Wonderland for the first time with illustrations by Tenniel. The book is not understood and remains largely unsold.

Since then, many translators and illustrators have come and gone all over the world to bring children of all times (and not just children…) closer to the fantastic and somewhat disturbing world of Alice. Not an easy undertaking, because Carroll's books are deeply linked to nineteenth-century English literary and childhood culture, but stimulating for the challenges it poses in restoring and possibly amplifying all the timeless creativity that is contained in them.

The exhibition “Lo Specchio delle Meraviglie. The images of Alice on her second journey”, set up at the MUSLI – School and Children's Book Museum and accompanied by a publication of the same name, edited by Pompeo Vagliani, published by the Tancredi di Barolo Foundation.