Fin dalla sorgente. Promuovere l’orientamento formativo attraverso gli sguardi plurimi e polimorfi delle fiabe classiche.

This paper highlights the importance of an early, continuous, and holistic educational approach to promoting career guidance, emphasizing the role, value, and contribution of classical literature, in light of its multifaceted nature and its divergent and creative potential. The central thesis is that the classic fairy tale can be conceived as an effective pedagogical device for fostering career guidance, understood as a continuous process of self-construction and life project development. Through a theoretical-hermeneutic approach grounded in an ecological and interdisciplinary perspective, fairy-tale domains belonging to different fields of knowledge (historical-social, legal-economic, ecological-naturalistic, medical-corporeal, linguistic-expressive, logical-mathematical, psychological-pedagogical) are explored in order to make explicit the specific contribution that each of them offers to the development of early career education. The analysis highlights how fairy tales foster processes of awareness, exploration, and decision-making, supporting the connection between the personal dimension (interests, aspirations, motivations) and the social and cultural horizon (current contexts, future perspectives). These constitute essential premises for promoting educational guidance from its very “source” and, from a lifelong perspective, at every stage of our lives.