Tim Parks - An Italian Education

ITALY MY HOMELAND

Italy, people of artists, martyrs, saints, of warriors, heroes and sailors, people of arduous achievement bent over their daily tasks, intent on constructing without pause, with muscles and spirit, a new civilisation in the world.

But it’s not just textbook and teacher telling the kids how they should think about things. When Maestra Elena stops in the exhibition room a moment to chat to me, she complains that almost all of the children’s essays show signs of parental, meaning maternal, interference. Immediately, I think of Michele screaming: ‘Mamma, but what can I say about my summer holiday? Mamma, what can I say about carnival? Mamma, what can I say about Bosnia?’ ‘Michele,’ I tell him, ‘just write what you think.’ ‘I said Mamma, not Papà! MAMMA…’

I ask Maestra Elena how she can tell there’s been interference. Is it that they always get their grammar right, that they don’t make any spelling mistakes? No, she says, far from it. No, it’s because they always say the right things . The interesting thing is how my son’s teacher no more doubts that these are the right things than she would question the declensions of a verb. It’s just that she wants the kids to get there on their own. Talking to my father-in-law about this, he laughs and tells me that he and his friends always finished whatever essay they wrote with a quote from II Duce. That way they could feel sure of a lodevole … Things are a little more subtle today but not much, if the following composition is anything to go by. Conscientiously dated February 27th 1970, it’s entitled, ‘If I had a nice big sum of money…’

If I had a nice big sum of money, I’d spend it like this: half I would give to the missionaries to build hospitals, homes, schools, churches for poor people. I would also send it so they could have running water and gas. I would send it willingly, just seeing in the newspaper and on television those poor black children with their swollen stomachs and their heads big from hunger. They are so hungry they eat lizards and ants.

The other half of the money I would save for my future.

Perhaps the child who wrote this had nonni in the house whose advice he had taken. Certainly, as the 1915 textbook says, ‘it’s as if he’d already enjoyed a long life.’ He knows how to please. Though the truth about my own children and those of all my friends is that they clamour endlessly (and understandably) for new toys. I can’t imagine a nice big sum of money would last very long in their hands.

A large, serious and forbidding book published in the early 1920s was already very much aware of the dangers of this split between rhetoric and reality. Perhaps it is part of any nation’s stable schizophrenia to be aware of a characteristic and perverse trait and then to persist in it anyway. This passage could have been taken, only very slightly altered and updated, from any contemporary newspaper.

The Italian flair for craft and cunning has exalted the use of rhetoric with which the unscrupulous seek to mislead the masses. It is deplorable what little authority over people the men of reason and figures enjoy in comparison with the speech-mongers. From small societies right up to parliament the prevalence of men gifted only in speaking is distressing. There are too many lawyers, too many orators holding positions of power…

But what a relief to get away from all this seriousness to the poems the children learn. For while the Italian language has a very long and strong suit in crafty rhetoric, perhaps its real trump card lies with the simplest and most innocent lyricism. A book from the 1920s is open at this little gem:

Cavallino trotta trotta

Che ti salto sulla groppa

Trotta trotta in Gran Bretagna

A pigliare il pan di Spagna

Trotta trotta in Delfinato

A pigliare il pan peppato

Trotta trotta e torna qui

Che c’è il pan di tutti i dì .

Again with all due apologies for my limitations as a translator of poetry, here is an approximation:

Trotalong, trotalong, pony bold

On your back I’ll jump and hold

Trot away to Britain Great

To get yourself some nice bread cake

Trot away to Picardy

To get some bread that’s nice and spicy

Then trot right back to Italy

For the bread of everyday.

The thoughtful teacher who laid out the exhibition has placed the poem alongside a reading that expresses the same moral rather more brutally. A little boy refuses to eat his regular bread roll in the morning because he wants a piece of cake. Upon which Breadroll answers back and gives the boy a very thorough lecture on the virtues of humble routine and simple pleasures (from morning to night — happily — in his workshop…)

Growing up anywhere in the world, I suppose, is partly a question of absorbing the lesson that you can’t always get what you want. But Italian children do get a great deal, as witness this most charming of all the poems, written, perhaps not so surprisingly, at the frenetic height of fascist grandiloquence. I say not surprisingly because sometimes I feel that the two extremes of Italian expression are there to counterbalance each other. These little verses were typed rather than appearing in a book; they were composed for the Cesare Betteloni end-of-term school play in 1930. Quite probably this is their first publication.

Ciliegie rosse e belle

lucenti e tenerelle

volete voi gustar

volete voi comprar

ciliegie eccole qua

tra la là la lalà lalà tralalà

Di queste perle rare

mi voglio incoronare

regina mi farò

gran ballo vi darò

guardate tutti qua

lalà lalà lalà lalà

Orecchini pendenti

bei visetti ridenti

mazzi giocondi e vivi

per abiti festivi

come stan bene qua

come stan bene là

lalà lalà lalà lalà

How perfect these silvery little rhythms are for expressing childlike joy, these even syllables and endless vowels. The resources of English lie elsewhere, I’m afraid…

Cherries red and fine

With their juicy shine

Do you want to try

Do you want to buy

Cherries! Here they are!

Tra la la, tra la la

With these pearls so rare

I’m going to crown my hair

I’ll make myself a queen

Throw a dance you’ve never seen

Look everybody, over here

Tra la la, tra la la

Ear-rings a-dangling

Pretty faces smiling

Bunches bright and gay

On clothes for holiday

How nice they look here!

There, how nice they are!

Tra la la, tra la la

One of the best snapshots we have of our own children is that of their two faces cheek to cheek in the orchard just beyond the house with freshly picked cherries draped dangling over their ears…

At this point my long mooching about the exhibition was interrupted by the teacher who had arranged it, none other than Gino d’Arezzo. Nervous, red-faced, he has brought a photographer along to take detailed photographs that will preserve his work forever. For never again, he feels, never again will it be possible to assemble such a collection of old books. The two are carrying a stepladder to help them get aerial shots from above the display tables. ‘Go ahead, go ahead,’ he tells me rather extravagantly, seeming at once put about and flattered that somebody is taking his exhibits seriously. I compliment him sincerely, on an excellent show, upon which, between moving the stepladder back and forth for the photographer and turning the light on and off to see how it will affect various exhibits, he explains that he feels the exhibition is important because people don’t realise how much school has changed. They are in danger of losing touch with their children. They don’t appreciate how modern and technical school has become. Light years away from their own days. I wonder if perhaps the teachers of the 1930s wouldn’t have said the same thing.