Tim Parks - An Italian Education

The first part of the ceremony now over, we file round the back of this ‘grandiose modern building’ to the spacious courtyard and the children…

The children. How easily they get forgotten in events of this kind! So far, apart from the prettily dressed girls pouting on the balcony, we haven’t seen any of them. Nobody has complained. Now, as we round the corner, there they all are in a great phalange in the middle of the courtyard, ready to do their stuff. And with surprising efficiency, the band are already sitting on their chairs beside them, spirited through the main building presumably while we walked round. The amplifier has likewise been brought through, so that already the speeches are beginning again. The headmistress. Again. The president of the district. Again. The councillor under investigation (he is refreshingly brief). Old teachers at the school.

Copying their parents, the children chatter and ignore the whole thing. Without even lowering his voice Stefano explains to me that when he was a kid, in the early fifties, they celebrated the school’s birthday every year. And all kinds of other birthdays too: the president’s, the republic’s. They had oodles of these events. They were always standing in courtyards waiting to recite poetry. Stefano seems more amused at this than upset. But no, he doesn’t remember a single poem…

We’re jerked out of our conversation by a bell. The caretaker, the oldest member of staff at the school, is waving a handbell around to show how he used to announce lesson changes some twenty years ago. Then some old pupils of times gone by are invited to the front and given a ‘diploma’ while the band plays ‘Oh, When the Saints’ with creditable vigour.

How Italians love diplomas, commemorative documents of every kind! Diplomas for having gone to a skating course, for having taken part in a volleyball competition, for being present at the inauguration of some institution or other. It’s rare to do anything in a group in Italy and not end up with a diploma. Perhaps they like them so much because these fancy pieces of paper parody those documents that are so vital in Italian life and which, in the event, are so hard won: school finishing exams, your degree…

After the ex-pupils, the caretaker is called back and he is awarded a diploma, too. A caretaker’s diploma! It’s a small red-orange scroll with a white ribbon tied around. Very attractive. He smiles, laughs, nods, but thankfully refuses to ‘take the floor’. Instead, he waves his diploma in the air and returns clownishly to his place, receiving great cheers from the children.

Now at last we are to hear the poem that Michele has been reciting so irritatingly for the past week (without my ever really listening). The centenary poem. But not all the kids, it turns out, will get a chance to say it. Six have been chosen and each will recite a few lines. Holding the now infamous microphone.

The poem is written in the local dialect. For although dialect is frowned upon in public discourse, considered uneducated, too domestic and direct (so that the headmistress, for example, would never address us in dialect and the postman president did his best not to), nevertheless it is apparently appropriate for poetry, for quaint and harmless expressions of pride in cultural identity. It’s interesting that, for all his love of the Romans and their lingua franca, Mussolini encouraged the use of dialects, perhaps understanding how they warmed people’s hearts, gave them a link with a more immediate past, a sense of community. And indeed the wonderful thing about dialect is that it has not been touched by new-speak of the likes of progettualità and percorsi didattici and attività psicomotoria (gym). No, the local dialect is as earthy as the broadest Yorkshire and brutally adenoidal, with the result that it always seems funny in the mouths of children, like watching a toddler trying to use a crowbar. In any event, it’s the dialect poem that gives us the day’s first attempt at humour, the first retreat from the façade of civic piety.

‘Our school is an ’undred year old,’ a very small chap begins, ‘but bearin’ up well despite all ’er colds.’

A girl with chubbily trembling knees goes on to suggest that a little beauty treatment of the poor lady’s cracked and yellowing old skin would not come amiss. But since they can hardly take her to a health clinic, whispers a bespectacled little boy, the pupils will do their best to keep her young at heart. Then a very self-assured young maiden explains that if the school ever feels lonely, the children will always be there shouting and playing to cheer her up. But will always, interrupts another, give her a nice long rest in summer. (Clearly the poetess has equated the school with i nonni .) Towards the end of fifty and more similarly cosy lines, the biggest boy in the oldest class is allowed the exclamation: ‘What a bore it is, ’aving to study!’ a line which he shouts with great enthusiasm, raising a yell of support from the other pupils and thunderous applause from the parents, who for the first time this morning have actually listened to something.

Twelve o’clock is almost upon us, well-synchronised tummies are beginning to rumble. But just before we go we are to get an example of what I can only call the other extreme of Italian speech… After the jolly, homespun, dialect poem, the main group of the children finally get their chance to do something. They are going to sing a song written by a teacher who goes by the noble name of Gino d’Arezzo. It is called ‘Imparare in Liberta’ — ‘Learning in Liberty’.

I said sing, but I should have said chant. Gino comes out front to conduct them. There’s a second’s silence, then rather tinnily (after the band) some taped music rattles out. But this is only to give the children rhythm. The minute they start to shout their lines, the tape is lost. Gino d’Arezzo waves his arms urgently. The first verse goes:

Nella scuola il mio domani c’è

leggo, scrivo, studio: serve a me

dal sapere nascerà una nuova società

società-à-à-à-à-à-à-à-à!

Which rather depressingly translates as:

The school is my tomorrow, my future

Reading, writing, studying, it’s so useful

From this knowledge born will be

A new society-ee-ee-ee!

Gino is obviously the kind of fellow who in English would be rhyming words like ‘ebony’ and ‘ivory’. The second verse goes:

Nella mente tante cose già

ideali ricchi di bontà

la cultura non sarà fonte di rivalità

civiltà-à-à-à-à questa è civiltà

This, in a now very poor translation, might go something like:

So much already in my mind

Fine ideals good and kind

Culture won’t breed competition

Civiliza-a-a-shun. That’s civiliza-a-a-shun!

I must confess I wasn’t ready for this. I feel thrown. Rather than being filled with fine ideals, my mind becomes the setting for a three-cornered tussle between hilarity, embarrassment and depression. The poem is awful, infinitely worse than the church choruses I remember singing as a child — ‘Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight,’ etc. Perhaps the problem is that Gino’s piety is not even underwritten by a formal religion, with all that religions imply in terms of mystery and our not really understanding the world: Sant’Eurosia’s miracles, appearances of the Madonna, and the like. No, Gino, his poem suggests, has it all worked out: one simply needs to be good and to tell the children to be good (and look to Europe). But the little boys and girls do belt the words out with such enthusiasm that one can see how Gino might imagine his percorso didattico is working.