PRIMA COMPOSIZIONE

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 worlds 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 smalltime 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 sacriftci 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 or- thodoxies.

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 council 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 copy book the following PATRIOTIC AND RELIGIOUS ANNIVERSARIES AND FESTIVALS for the month of March:

1 1st March 1896, The Battle of Adua, Africa

2 4th March 1848, Carlo Alberto grants the constitution

3 7th March 1785, birth of Manzoni

4 10th March 1872, death of Mazzini

5 11 March 1544, birth of Tasso

6 17th March 1861, proclamation in Turin of the new Kingdom of Italy

7 18th March 1848, Milan rises against the Austrians, beginning of the glorious period known as the 5 Days

8 19 March, San Giuseppe's day

9 22 March 1848, Austrians chased out of Milan and Venice

10 23 March 1849, beginning of the glorious 10 Days of Brescia in the rising against the Austrians

11 25 March, Annunciazione di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo

12 28 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 5. 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. They can't be priests, he says. He is right.

But they can be teachers. And the irony surrounding Operaia e massaia is that very soon it would be the girls who had the most obvious and immediate role model in the classroom, la maestra herself. Schools, particularly at the lower levels, are now an almost exclusively female domain. Having missed Gino d'Arezzo at the scuola elementare, my son will probably reach adolescence without ever being in class with a male teacher.

But having become teachers, what kind of model do these women offer? A little girl's exercise book from 1970 is open at the following composition:

MY SIGNORINA HAS GONE!

Today, 25 March 1970 was the last day that our maestra, Signora Argentina Zanoll, will take our lessons. Some children, even when the lessons had only just begun, threw rice over her to celebrate her promotion. For us it was a rather sad morning because we knew that after three years of lessons with this maestra we would have to leave her. The saddest moment was when the bell rang to go home. The Signorina gave each one of us a kiss, almost all the girls were crying and the Signorina with tears in her eyes tried to console them. She said she would always remember all of us and that she will often come to say hello and that the new maestra would love us just as much as she did. Having left the classroom, we set off home with happy memories of our good maestra, who, for all this time, has been just like a mamma to us.

Just like a mamma. . . . Why is it that Italians, men and women alike, find it so difficult to think about a woman without that word popping up. For all its championing the female right to education, Operaia e massaia is no exception in seeing woman as a nurturer of protagonists, rather than a protagonist herself.

You future Italian mothers, future educators of a new generation, encourage with calm and mild words the tendency toward peace among nations, inspire in all the hearts that surround you the horror of war that makes men crueler than beasts. But should your brothers and fathers and husbands one day have to run to defend the sacred borders of our land, then kiss them with smiles of love and hope. It is your fine and holy mission, oh Women, to preach peace, peace in the family, peace in the state, peace among nations. But it is also your duty, and a no less holy duty, to rouse spirits when men must fight in the name of independence and liberty, and to give your praise to valor, but valor demonstrated in a legitimate struggle.

Is this an exercise in having your cake and eating it? The Italians have a lovely expression for getting things both ways, they talk about having “your wife drunk and the barrel full,” i.e., she's off your back and you can drink to your heart's content. Or, you've made your wife happy without even spending anything. . . . The funny thing is hearing women use this irretrievably sexist expression.

* * *

A six year old's exercise book, lying on one of the old school desks, gives the child's (guided) reaction to this heady mixture of patriotism and feminine sweetness. We're in 1926 now:

Page one: a cut-out photo of the king.

Page two: (in huge handwriting) “Mamma I love you lots and lots, I promise I will be good.”

Page three: a cut-out photo of il Duce.

Page four: “December 8th, I love and worship Maria.”

Page five: “December 13th, Santa Lucia has brought me a pram with a pretty doll.” (Santa Lucia is the Veronese children's Father Christmas, of which more anon.)

Page six: “Dear Baby Jesus please help me to be good.”

Page seven: “January 6th, the three kings brought Jesus gold, frankincense and myrrh.”

Page eight: “Long live the Queen and Empress, Elena of Savoy.”

Beside it, another notebook of an older child lists the main events of the same year:

26 January: agreements between Italy and Great Britain on the repayment of the national debt.

18 August: second attempt in Rome on the life of President Benito Mussolini, carried out by the British subject Violet Albina Gibson. The president is lightly wounded in the nose.

11 September: Pesaro agreement, vital for the stabilization of the Lira.

[date missing]: third attempt in Rome on President Benito Mussolini's life, carried out by political exile and anarchist Gino Luccetti; his bomb hits the presidential car but only explodes after rebounding on the ground.

31 October: fourth attempt in Bologna on the life of President Benito Mussolini, carried out by Anteo Zamboni, immediately lynched by the outraged crowd. The leader of the Black Shirts is grazed by the bullet but unhurt.

Was this a particularly bad year for Benito? And what did the children make of the bizarre behavior of British women, their attraction to the Italian male nose? But if this led to any confusion as to the nature of male and female roles, it would soon be cleared up. The peace mission of the “future mothers of Italy” does not play a prominent role in this reading for the fourth-grade elementary class of 1938, though it's amusing that while men are at the center of all the action, Italy itself always gets feminine pronouns:

From 3 October 1935 to 5 May 1936 Fascist Italy conquered the Abyssinian Empire. In seven months the Italian legionaries conquered the vast Abyssinian army and occupied a country four times the size of Italy. Fifty-two nations opposed this campaign, and fascist Italy alone took on and conquered all her enemies.

How did she conquer them? First and foremost by faith, faith in the justice of her cause, faith in the king, faith in il Duce. Then with the strength and valor of her race, the strength and valor of her legionaries, who with constant heroism overcame the most arduous tasks, the strength and valor of all Italian men and all Italian women who accepted any and every sacrifice, even donating their wedding rings to the cause of the Italian motherland. They won with their valor and their genius, the achievements of the legionaries being supported by powerful weapons of war used on a grand scale for the first time in the Ethiopian campaign: airplanes, tanks, radio. These mighty and modern instruments of war, precious in peace and terrible in conflict, were the product of Italian genius. The airplane was conceived by the Italian Leonardo da Vinci; this great inventor likewise studied the possibility of the propeller, but the application of the propeller to a flying machine was made possible only after the invention of the internal combustion engine, first constructed by the Italian Eugenio Barsanti. The tank was also conceived and designed by Leonardo da Vinci. The tank is neither more nor less than a small automobile armored with steel, the automobile moving by virtue of Barsanti's internal combustion engine. Then came the radio, through which news can fly at the speed of lightning. The radio too is an exclusively Italian invention conceived by Guglielmo Marconi. Thus Italy truly did everything alone, she conquered her Empire not only with her heroism, but also with her genius. Entrusted to the marvelous talents of the Italian race, this is the Empire of justice, of genius, of work, the Empire of civilization . . .

The text must have made heavy reading indeed on the smoky winter benches of the Cesare Betteloni school in Montecchio. But then the compositions couldn't have been much fun either. “You are looking at a portrait of il Duce,” suggests another textbook of the time. “Record your feelings (of pride and admiration).”

The parenthetical prompt is less out of date than one would imagine. Perhaps it is part of the language's rhetorical vocation, I don't know, but so much schooling in Italy seems to depend on encouraging children to have orthodox ideas and then express them in extravagant tones. It's remarkable, after all, how much of the basic emotional gesturing is the same in the woman's textbook of 1915, the eulogy to fascist enterprise in 1938, and Gino d'Arezzo's 1994 poem on the construction of the New Man. There's a confidence, an exhortatory pride, a radical piety that admits of no contradiction, or even indifference. A textbook entitled Pagine gaie (Gay Pages), published not in 1930 but in 1960 has a reading that begins as follows.

ITALY MY HOMELAND

Italy, people of artists, martyrs, saints, of warriors, heroes and sailors, people of arduous achievements bent over their daily tasks, intent on constructing without pause, with muscles and spirit, a new civilization 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. When I talk 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 il 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 27, 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 that second composition exercise in 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 clamor 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 Delftnato

A pigliare il pan pepato

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:

Trot along, trot along, 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 but 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 voglto 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 child-like 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 is 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 out and flattered that somebody is taking his exhibits seriously. I compliment him 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 realize 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.

“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 learned 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 1

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-barreled 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. Men, 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.