- Well, my guys, on Monday, February 3 the Germans will arrive - I announced sollemnly to my 5 B on a January, quiet morning (school-year 2013-14).Alex, a rather docile and friendly boy who sat in the front row, gasped, eyes wide with a slight fright.- Mom! - he exclaimed. - World War II!
- Now, come on, don't overdo it! The war has been over for almost seventy years, and, in the meantime, our relations with the Germans are much improved. It's a group of teachers visiting our school. Two of them will attend our Italian lesson at the fourth hour. Therefore, we must prepare ourselves. -
German poster of the beginning of World War I (1914)
In fact, a few days before, a group of us teachers had been called in the room near the head-master's office to discuss what to do. In essence, our visitors were some teachers of German high schools (I think they came from Bavaria), come into contact with one of our school teachers (the colleague of German) I suppose, thanks to the Comenius project. They had to stop in some classes and attend peacefully our lessons, without intervening. Needless to say that the classes were chosen with care, and I think that, being still quite young (and perhaps inexperienced), I owe the fact I was selected to my 5B, a rather quiet and polite class, where I was supposed to have two hours of lessons between the fourth and fifth hour of that fateful Monday. I should also add that, after years of Switzerland and German, I could even interact with our guests.
The group led the meeting next to the head-master's office with typical, Italian spirit, among a lot of jokes and with considerable self-irony. In fact, it is very well-known known that Italian teachers are generally good and competent, but that our structures are often in a sorry state: and although our high school is more than acceptable and of fairly recent construction, comparing mentally ourselves with the dream-classrooms available to our colleagues across the Alps, we had to address the issue with a lot of humor. In short, we teachers had to "compensate" the landscape. Two years ago, for example, we had not yet projectors in every classroom (there are now and I use the projector in a permanent position): so, I would have to improvise my lesson on the exclusive ground of my "rhetorical skills" (ie, on my well known attitude of chatter-box), without any audio-video support.
The funniest part concerned, however, the bathrooms for teachers. Well, at the "Roiti", those for students, according to my opinion of authoritative expert on bathrooms and toilets in general, are very good, but those for teachers leave much to be desired: at the main building there is a very valid one, but it is one (without taking into consideration the one near the secretariat), plus someone else scattered between headquarters and branch that, despite the janitors' fatigue, is architecturally rather backward. In short, the bathrooms for the professors are the last thing to be taken into account in a school, and I have to admit that our historic rival, the high school "Ariosto", has bathrooms for teachers fitting the cover of a decorating magazine. Personally, I believe that the situation is more dramatic in the branch, where we have a bathroom in the basement, without even a mirror (which is why in the morning, while crowds of students swarm around the high school, I use the rearview mirror of my car to put lipstick in a race before rushing in) and one on the third floor, so that you have to climb several flights of stairs to reach it. To put it as one of my colleagues did that day, the view of our toilets for teachers would even have laxative effects (no, the colleague in question expressed in a much more drastic way, which I prefer to leave here in my pen - beep beep of the censorship! - ); so, at the big question: "Headmaster, and if our guests want to go to the bathroom, what do we reply?", the headmaster replied authoritatively:- About scatological matters, send them to me. -
The preparation of the lesson required some care: after anticipating the topic, I asked my guys only to get involved and to put a lot of questions ("Don't let me keeping a monologue like Hamlet for an hour long"), to create a suitable atmosphere; then, I had to think of the content. I expected we would have finished by then Pascoli: but the poet Giovanni Pascoli was not a subject fitting our propaganda ambitions. Beautiful poetry, but catastrophic biography (Alessandro Manzoni competes with him for the amount of family deaths: father, for more murdered, mother and three brothers for Pascoli; for Manzoni, two wives, his mother, a mass of friends and children; Manzoni wins ). So I resorted to Gabriele D'Annunzio.
Caricature of D'Annunzio that tries to revive Eleonora Duse ... I wonder why ....
The biography of D'Annunzio, given that it is told with a good acting, is fun. Apart from his poems, very beautiful ones indeed, literary works, politics and war, the conquest of Fiume after the First World War and so on, even now researchers wonder about the number of his lovers: if you have to count them in tens, or hundreds or (?) thousands. I have always stressed, in every lecture of mine about him, that I just do not understand all of those women who ran after him: he was not only short and not exactly handsome, but I also instinctively mistrust deceivers who "inturtian" you, to put it in our Ferrara dialect: those who enchant and take you for a ride with a bunch of nice words. D'Annunzio was the classic seducer of the worst kind: he "fleeced" not a few of his mistresses (like Eleonora Duse and Maria Gravina), cheerfully passing from one to another. Moreover, few remember that his real last name was the very little elegant Rapagnetta (one of the protagonists of Pereira by Antonio Tabucchi, calls him grimly like that): D'Annunzio was the last name of his uncle, who left a large inheritance to the family (readily spent by the father). With a little wickedness, sometimes I surprise myself thinking that, if he had kept the original family name, he would have been a bit less seductive.My plan was therefore the following one: lecture on the biography of Gabriele D'Annunzio, properly "seasoned" with details and anecdotes (sometimes spicy ones), and a good framing of his character and work: duration, 45 to 50 minutes; then, to celebrate our guests (and also to celebrate ourselves) for the last 15 minutes, I would bring a cake. I opted for the trifle ("Zuppa inglese"). Actually, I was thinking more of my students than of the guests: my 5 B, two years ago, was coming out of a difficult period, and, in my view, they were a class in need of sugars and pampering, so I took the opportunity ... to cuddle them. And so "zuppa inglese" was. (to be continued).
It should be funny: that's our real life!
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