VENICE — As subversive books go, many of the 49 children’s tales hardly seem seditious.

There is the story of the male dog who aspired to be a ballerina. The one about the little boy who wanted to be a princess, and a princess who wanted to be a soccer player. The tale of the penguin egg hatched and adopted by two male penguins (based on a real story at the Central Park Zoo in New York). And another about a little boy who learns to live with a physical disability, metaphorically depicted as a little saucepan that bangs around in his wake.

Yet one of the first formal acts of Venice’s new conservative mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, was to announce that he would ban them from the city’s preschool libraries.

After an outcry — from residents, authors, publishers, librarian associations and even Amnesty International — he whittled his list of banned books to just two.

But that was not before the mayor had ignited a lively debate about the right of educators to choose their teaching tools without political interference, and about Italy’s continuing struggle with broadening civil rights for gays.