Sara Lazzaro

During the Christmas holidays, between the gifts and the pandoro (not the Ferragni one, mind you!), we “distracted” ourselves with the new TV series Un Professore, starring Alessandro Gassmann who has recently enjoyed considerable success on Netflix. Back in class, we didn’t hesitate for a moment to tell the teacher of Literature, trying to open a debate, in the evident hope of missing a few hours of class (spoiler: mission accomplished!).

n recent days we have all become aware of the terrible events of November 11th, the day of the death of Giulia Cecchettin, the 105th woman killed in Italy in 2023. Less has been said about the other 104, yet they all shared the same fate . Giulia’s case caused a particular sensation due to the mystery of the first days, when the news was still not certain, and due to the extremely lucid interviews given by her sister Elena.

<<Will Prof leave us the time?>> We ask the literature teacher as soon as he enters the classroom. <<For the article… I mean, we wanted to write about Giulia, but it’s complicated. Maybe we thought we’d start talking about it among ourselves, as it comes… we’ll sit around the desk>>.

In recent days a teacher at the  Righi High School in Rome has made national headlines for alleged improper behavior towards an Italian-Israeli who was made unconfortable, according to newspaper reports, by the way the teacher chose to address the Israeli-Palestinian issue in classroom.

Every day newcasts, media, social networks build an image of the new adolescents as a violent and superficial generation  completely incapable of loving and passionate.  Certainly some receny episodes of news, of which groups of teenagers have been protagonists, can be an easyground for narratives of this type. But it is really the realilty?

August is ending, the air finally cools and we can see the end of summer. September has always seemed to me a melancholic month… Perhaps because it is a month that “forces” us to start again, to go towards the new (which maybe we have laboriously conquered!) but also to separate ourselves from what has been, to let go of what we know we cannot take with us.

On June 21st I arrived at school very early. At 7.30 I was already in front of the gates surrounded by the tense, supportive but also amused looks of all the students who were waiting to enter to take the first test of the State Exam. This time of waiting that, every year, I share with them seems to me a dip in distant memories and I recognize myself in the smiles now uncertain now bold, in the jokes, in the hugs, in the collective hope of making it that you breathe in the air and on the skin

<<Exams are close…and you’re too far from my room>> sang Antonello Venditti in 1984 in Night before examsone of the most beautiful songs ever dedicated to the narration of that wonderful and “dramatic” period that all the boys live close to the final exam. Every now and then I happen to listen to it again, with a pinch of nostalgia, while I observe the students of the fifth grade of my school who, every year, discover it and fall in love with it.