Daniele Luchetti
La Scuola

It was strange to discover, through a Facebook page that I happened upon, that Nino is no longer here. The art history professor who, over three years scattered throughout my five years of high school, often made me smile amidst the bleakness of the late '90s, has stopped teaching forever. And also stopped doing anything else.

In school, at the high school, I was nobody, living trapped in a reality I hated, which made it so I left maturity with 19 years on the documents but still 15 in my head. Then I rushed to catch up. Right after the oral graduation exam, I returned home feeling the chains dissolve, breathing summer for the first time with full lungs after years of winter; I sat on the couch and watched Daniele Luchetti's "La scuola." Somehow, I don’t know why, it brought me peace.

That was probably also the last day I saw Nino: it was July 2001, the Twin Towers were still standing, and Bin Laden would escape for another ten years. I didn’t say goodbye, didn’t shake his hand, perhaps didn’t forgive him for the little severity a professor should maintain during his classes, preventing the class from becoming a cauldron of swearing and flying papers, but what’s worse is that I couldn’t fully savor the extra-scholastic teachings he was able to dispense. I admired him as a man, but was too withdrawn to show it. However, that evening when you invited some students to Monza to watch a projection of I-don’t-know-what slides, I was there; at the back, in the corner, in the dark, but I was there. Even then, I didn’t know what slides they were, but I was there for you. I was small, inside more than outside; now I am older.

"La scuola," for me, speaks about him as it can speak about many others for anyone who has seen a teacher not as a threat but as a push for improvement. It’s one of the many academic films produced by the Italian ‘90s, precisely in 1995. Perhaps the best. During the last day of school in a suburban Roman institution, the generous professor Vivaldi (Silvio Orlando) tries to salvage what he can in a distressed class, full of students at risk of failing. He is assisted in the endeavor by Professor Majello (Anna Galiena), who harbors a mysterious love within the school that has renewed her vitality after years in a dull and emotionless marriage. However, the strict and energetic deputy head Sperone (Fabrizio Bentivoglio, the very best) does not agree and, along with other less aggressive but cynical teachers such as Cirrotta (Antonio Petrocelli) and Mortillaro (Roberto Nobile), will fight to exhaustion to decimate the class. The scrutiny session is completed by other figures of teachers who are indifferent to the final outcome (Gea Martire, Vittorio Ciorcalo, Anita Zagaria) and/or weak of character (Enrica Maria Modugno) whose only thought is to finish the day quickly, while the entire session is supervised by a principal (Mario Prosperi), just ignorant enough ("do you know Kafka's Metamorphosis?" "I'm sorry, I haven’t seen it.."), who embodies the academic figure of a modern-day Pontius Pilate.

Amid moments of intimacy, flashbacks, arguments, and desperate interrogations to raise the students' grades, during this last day of school experienced in the Vivaldi-Sperone duel, the personal stories of the teachers surface in all their instability; the library ceiling collapses, crushing hidden woven loves, every desire for change of a stagnant reality ("the real repeaters are us" Sperone says dejectedly as dusk falls on the gym) and the hopes for renewal of a static and uninfluential educational system on the future ("the Italian school system only works for those who don’t need it" Vivaldi thunders at the start of the scrutiny). It’s a school falling apart observed from the teachers' viewpoint, a collective film where students unusually take a back seat: Cardini, the one in the worst shape, is the most mentioned but is also the one you never see. A wrecked school where Nino, every now and then, like Silvio Orlando, tried to pour drops of humanity that were partially gathered, even by someone like me, always in the shadows.

Given the continuous emails you sent us even after we left high school, full of greetings in a Sicilian too tight to be fully understood by a Milanese, wherever you are, maybe you'll read this: having not said goodbye to you ten years ago, I do so now. Maybe if you saw me now you’d say "And put out that cigarette".