Tim Parks - An Italian Education

Michele arrives with a cake in one hand and a fistful of cheese biscuits in the other. Speaking with his mouth full, he’s eager to show me a puppet-making project he’s been involved in and leads me into a classroom where the exhibition continues. Arranged down the middle are five ancient desks, painted a dirty blue-green and more or less fitting the description of the desks in Ferdinando Ruffo’s hard times. An assortment of old text and copybooks is laid out on top. Michele drags me to the wall where his puppets are displayed under the rather depressing heading CREATIVITY AND MANUALITY TODAY.

But at this point, with one o’clock approaching and that Italian propriety that demands that an aperitivo be followed promptly by a meal, everybody begins to make their escape. I have just begun to look at a row of black-and-blue witches, their lumpy papier-mâché faces squeezed into extravagant grimaces and smiles when Maestra Elena comes in to tell us they want to close. Michele is furious, to the point of tears. So I promise him, and myself, that I will come back during the week to look at the show again. And indeed, what follows in the next chapter are fragments of this, as it turned out, excellent exhibition, a sort of dialogue between the printed page put in front of the children and what they themselves wrote down in their copybooks. Perhaps I should add that it was while poring over these exhibits with notebook and dictaphone that I got for the first time an acute sense of that national and moral history that my children, like all other Italians, will inevitably absorb, the attitudes and mental gestures society makes available to them. As so often when looking at anything that has to do with the past, I was surprised at once by how very much and how very little has changed. What year is it now? 1994? Or Anno Fascista LXXII …

First Composition Lesson, 1915:

Daddy works is a simple sentence to which other words or complements may be added in order to complete the sense. For example:

Daddy works happily

where happily is a complement, or

Daddy works happily from morning till night

where from morning till night is another complement,

or

Daddy, out of love for his family, works happily in his

workshop from morning till night

out of love for his family and in his workshop are two

more complements.

Daddy, out of love for his family, works happily in his workshop from morning till night… The whole mythology of Italian bourgeois life is presented in a nutshell in the very first lezione di composizione : the small-time artisan slaving (but creatively, in his own workshop) for the sake of his wife and children. Not unlike dear San Giuseppe, patron saint of carpenters. The word sacrifici need not even be mentioned. The child will be aware that he should be grateful and should emulate. But the key fact here is that Daddy is out of the house, absent (we presume, and for convenience’s sake everybody agrees, at the workshop).

I remember that one of the first compositions Michele had to write was about people’s occupations. He wrote: ‘The baker bakes bread, sells it and makes money. The carpenter makes cupboards, sells them and makes money. The farmer makes food, sells it and makes money.’ Clearly there are moments when lucidity pierces even the densest of orthodoxies.

The second composition in 1915 put down another cornerstone of the Italian’s mental architecture:

Blessed is that family where there are old people, says an ancient proverb, and happy the children who heed the counsel of the old, for it’s as if they had already enjoyed a long life. Love your grandparents, children, for they love you as the sons and daughters of their sons and daughters, and hence with a double tenderness. If you see they love your company, don’t leave them alone, and when it’s their birthday, never forget to wish them many happy returns, ‘A hundred more happy returns, Granny and Granddad!’

Don’t forget, Michele and Stefi!

Today, in the 1990s, the school’s end-of-term plays, whether it be Christmas or summer, always include a figure with pipe and straw hat who complains that nobody cares about the old anymore. And Stefi objects: ‘Oh, but I do care, if only they would visit…’

In 1906 a child noted down in his copybook the following PATRIOTIC AND RELIGIOUS ANNIVERSARIES AND FESTIVALS for the month of March:

1st March 1896, The Battle of Adua, Africa

4th March 1848, Carlo Alberto grants the constitution

7th March 1785, birth of Manzoni

10th March 1872, death of Mazzini

11th March 1544, birth of Tasso

17th March 1861, proclamation in Turin of the new Kingdom of Italy

18th March 1848, Milan rises against the Austrians, beginning of the glorious period known as the Five Days

19th March, San Giuseppe’s Day

22th March 1848, Austrians chased out of Milan and Venice

23rd March 1849, beginning of the glorious Ten Days of Brescia in the rising against the Austrians

25th March, Annunciazione di N.S.G.C. [Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo]

28th March 1483, birth in Urbino of the painter Raphaele Sanzio, known as ‘The Divine’. The Transfiguration was his last painting, and his most sublime.

One notes: 3 battles against Austrian imperialism, 1 for Italian imperialism (lost, against the Ethiopians, at Adua); 3 anniversaries for poets, 2 for the church, 1 for a painter, 1 for the constitution; 2 uses of the word ‘glorious’ (for Italian resistance to Austria, but not Ethiopian resistance to Italy), 1 use of ‘sublime’, notably in the confident superlative, ‘the most sublime’ (does ‘the least sublime’ exist?); and, finally, o mentions of women, unless by allusion in the Annunciation…

With this total absence of female role models, a book entitled Operaia e massaia — Woman Worker and Housewife (1915) — was still having to explain exactly why women should bother getting an education at all:

There was a time, not long ago, impossible as it may seem, when people believed that education wasn’t necessary for women. There were even people who said it was dangerous. And this prejudice has still not been entirely overcome. I say that it may seem impossible, because, if education is necessary for men, then it’s even more necessary for women, since they are destined to become the first teachers of their men children. An uneducated woman cannot be free from prejudices and she will communicate these to her children. An illiterate woman cannot experience the sweet comfort of watching over and helping her little boy in the first steps of his education. And what is more beautiful and poetic than the mother who holds her little son’s hand as he does his first writing exercises or as she listens to him repeating his first little school lessons. Does not a young woman lose much of her beauty and grace if she can’t read either those books that lift the soul to God, or those magazines that teach so many things both for domestic life and for the execution of housewifely tasks? And if she isn’t married and her loved one is far away, in order to write to him she will have to turn to a third person and admit him to her most intimate secrets. What humiliation! What mortification!

So women have become educated in order: 1. to teach their male children; 2. to devote their minds to God; 3. to learn how to be in fashion; 4. to keep house and to… write to their boyfriends. When over lunch my own daughter Stefi announces that she wishes to be an airline pilot, big brother Michele tells her she can’t. Because she’s a woman. I remark that on the contrary Stefi can do anything she wants. But Michele gets angry, because at school, he claims, he has been told that women can’t be pilots. Or racing drivers. And at school they must be right. No, women can do anything, I insist, Stefi can do anything she wants. My son sits there glaring at me. Women can’t be priests, he says. He is right.