"Carl Ipsen sets out in this absorbing study to demonstrate that the period between the 1870s and the First World War was when Italian society recognized that it needed to take care of its most marginal, mistreated and poor children... Ipsen has a knack of enticing the reader into each of his chapters on the reform campaigns with aptly chosen case studies...[He] has performed a useful service to his profession in documenting in such detail this all-too-human tale of idealism foundering in a harsh material world." - Colin Heywood, Reader in Modern French History, the University of Nottingham