Tim Parks - An Italian Education

‘From next year the fourth and fifth years will be learning the computer,’ he reminds me.

I remember when I was sixteen the grand fanfare for the introduction of computer programming in my grammar school. Everything we learnt is now hopelessly out of date.

The photographer is trying to work out some way of screwing a small tripod to the stepladder. These technicalities…

‘And everything’s so much more analytical these days,’ Gino goes on earnestly, as if I had to be converted somehow, to become a New Man, perhaps. He draws my attention to a project the children have just completed on the village of Montecchio. ‘Methodology of Research,’ it begins. ‘To stimulate the capacity for orientation in vital space…’ Beneath are the children’s accounts of how they get to and from school through the village streets. Mainly by car…

The photographer decides that there is too much glare from the window and that he will have to use artificial light. Why, one wonders, don’t they just take photocopies of all the books, since almost all the exhibits are books? In any event, having congratulated Gino d’Arezzo once again, I feel it is time to demonstrate my own capacity for orientation in vital space by finding my way back home. In the porch I stop to note the new commemorative stone unveiled the previous day. It reads:

ON THE FIRST CENTENARY

OF THE INSTITUTION OF THE CESARE BETTELONI SCHOOL

THE SCHOLASTIC COMMUNITY, THE CITIZENRY,

AND THE CIVIL AUTHORITIES

CELEBRATE AND REMEMBER

14 MARCH 1994

Opposite, is the stone unveiled a hundred years ago:

ON THE 50TH BIRTHDAY OF H.M. UMBERTO I

KING OF ITALY

THE COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE OF MONTECCHIO VERONESE,

THE MAYOR, COUNT DR GIUSEPPE RIZZARDI,

IN THE PRESENCE OF SENATOR COUNT LUIGI SORMANI-MORETTI

PREFECT OF VERONA,

INAUGURATED THIS BUILDING,

WHICH ON THE DESIGN OF ENGINEER GIOVANNI MOSCONI

AND WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF THE GOVERNMENT

WAS RAISED AS A GRACIOUS HOME

FOR THE TOWN HALL AND SCHOOLS

14 MARCH 1894

While kings and counts, multiple titles and double-barrelled names have clearly gone out of fashion, one can’t help feeling a strong sense of continuity. Outside, a soft March rain is falling and somebody rides by on a bike under an open umbrella. Walking home I glimpse into a mechanic’s dark workshop to find that he is indeed working away from morning till night for the sake of his family. Whether happily or not it’s hard to tell when a man is under a car. But he does have two young teenagers as apprentices. Boys, of course. Though not Slavs in this case. Back home Mario tells me that he, Silvio and Francesco are determined to proceed with formal legal action against Righetti. We can’t go on forever with someone living in our basement. ‘Only it could take years,’ he worries, the legal system being what it is. Not a hundred, I hope.

When I went to primary school, I carried no bag, because the books were all there, inside my desk. Or if I did, it was a pump bag for gym, or for games. Later, when there was homework, one carried a little briefcase, which went with the collar and tie — we were little businessmen, little accountants and executives, travelling to school on bus and tube — and inside that bag it smelt of sandwiches because the school meals were so awful you opted out.

In Italian schools only essential texts are provided and only up to a certain age. Others are bought by the parents. They’re expensive. This means that if they were left in the school, people would be afraid of their being stolen, afraid of having to pay for them again, afraid of losing all the places they have underlined them and written notes in the margin. There are no lockers.

So the children carry all their books to school every day — from six years old to eighteen. Not in briefcases, which probably wouldn’t be big enough and certainly wouldn’t go with the casual clothing the children wear. Instead, they have backpacks of fluorescent pink and yellow with ‘Invicta’ written on them and shiny plastic buckles, the same as they will carry years later about the streets of Rome and Paris and London when their mothers finally feel able to let them go away for a few days on a school journey. I weighed Michele’s school backpack one morning. Five kilos of books…

But however heavy they may be, their backpacks will never smell of sandwiches, because the food is so good no one would ever dream of opting out of school meals. Or rather, the mothers would never dream of letting the authorities let the food get so bad that anyone would want to opt out.

And they’ll never smell of football boots either. For school offers no games, no extracurricular activities. There are no music lessons, no singing lessons, no school choir, no carpentry for the boys and cookery for the girls, no hockey, no cricket, no netball, no basketball, no football, no swimming, no athletics, no sports day, no school teams. The school doesn’t, as it does in England, pretend to offer a community that might in any way supplant the family, or rival Mamma. That’s important. It doesn’t, and later on the university won’t either, try to create in the child the impression of belonging to a large social unit with its own identity. There is no assembly in the morning, no hymn singing, no prayers, no speech day. Apart from the centenary, which, as the headmistress pointed out, can hardly happen every day, school, for Stefi at six, for Michele at eight, is no more and no less than reading and writing and mathematics, geography and science, oh, and English (just introduced) and, of course, I’ora di religione , or, in my children’s case, ‘Osservazione all’Europa’, where they have now learnt that one of the things that unites European nations is, not our school, not our state, but our… religion.

The Reformation can wait.

No, if children want extracurricular activity of any kind, they have to go outside school; the parents have to look for it, and take them there… and pay. Late afternoons become full of sacrifici of time and money.

Gigi La Magna, who cuts Michele’s hair, plays for the local football team, A. C. Montecchio. He talks to friends who hang about the shop while he cuts hair. He complains about decisions the coach has made. He tells Michele he once played with Roberto Baggio. It was a friendly match in the village of Illasi. He scored that day and Baggio didn’t.

Is this a true story?

Gigi’s father, Giobatta, claims he has healing powers that are transmitted through his fingertips, sometimes merely when he is cutting hair. Yes, once he healed a person who was terminally ill without even knowing, merely by cutting his hair.

Is this a true story?

In any event, it’s a relief that Michele’s trips to the barber only encourage him to start playing football, not to become a faith-healer. The trophies on the shelves, after all, that so impress him, come from football…

When I was a child, to play football we headed for the nearest public park or waste ground after school and kicked the ball at each other. Or we played with a tennis ball in the playground. Sometimes there would be two or three games of different age groups all crossing each other, up and down, right to left on the bumpy tarmac. On games afternoons the Maths teacher or the R.I. teacher would split us into eleven against eleven, or however many we happened to be, and let us loose on the playing fields. Playing, we learnt to play, and I seem to remember having a good time, too. But apparently this was wrong. Or so the young fellow who takes the inscriptions at A. C. Montecchio tells me. Apparently, this was terribly ingenuous of us and explains why English football is now so backward. No, no, no, they take their sport much more seriously, he assures me, in Italy. Or perhaps it’s just the times that have changed.