Tubercolo, when the children of Veneziasi went to school in the square (and even brought the quay) Photo
There are stories that come back to the surface and are recovered thanks to curiosity. It may happen, for example, to see a old black and white movie shot immediately Postwar period and wonder why in the age of children so small and puny they went to school carrying on his shoulders not the satchel with the books and notebooks inside, but the desk directly. A foldable and transportable banquet. Basically, a bench with suspenders. “A poet from Este, Maria Luisa Rosina, told me about it, she was the one who pushed to reconstruct this singular and in some ways very current story”, says Giacomo Spoladore, stage name James D. Dawson, director and author of the documentary that reconstructed a centenary story making the characters of the time talk: yesterday’s little children who went to school with the banquet on their backs today are the grandparents who follow their grandchildren in Dad, distance learning. Yesterday it was there tuberculosistoday is the coronavirus.
THE TUBERCULOSIS
The Great White Plague. This is how tuberculosis was called in the eighteenth century, a disease that lasted centuries and which seemed not to know the defeat. Even today, the estimate is half a million new TB cases in the world. Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century, also as a form of fight against infectious diseases, outdoor schools were born: in the face of poverty, malnutrition, lack of hygiene, unhealthy homes and schools crowded, the idea was that to study outside help children, especially the weakest of constitution. Among the cities that see the promotion of outdoor schools, in addition to Milan and Bologna, there is Padua. Here the first experiment is given in 1905. A few years later, on May 24, 1922, on the initiative of Professor Mario Cacciavillani, the benches with suspenders arrive in a small town in the province, Este, only it remains here for a long time.
Maria Luisa Rosina, a former employee now retired, poetess, comes to know it almost by chance, seeing a film of the Istituto Luce of 1949. Only that the lady does not just smile: she wants to deepen, learn more, understand why in Este the boys went to school with the desk on their backs and because that experience lasted over time. This is how director Spoladore comes into play. «Me too – he says – I am passionate».
The project to make the documentary was born in 2020, in full from Covid-19, when children no longer went to class because schools were closed due to health care and the study took place with tablets. Dad, distance learning. Like a century before, when studying on the lawns.
THE TESTIMONIALS
Driven by Mrs. Rosina’s curiosity, the director tracks down some former students of those folding desks: Valter Pieressa, Maria Luisa Rea, Giustino Crivellaro, Mario Rolandi. And he collects their testimonies. «A penance to sit on those banquets, how many pinches to the hands». Memories and smiles: «We learned the first swear words by wearing rules at the benches, there were precise rules to follow, you almost had to squat down, put on a suspender, then the second. What a pain”. And not just regrets: «Was it nice to study outdoors? It depends, because it is true that there was the scent of trees in bloom, but there were also many bees ».
IN THE LAGOON
On the initiative of the regional councilor Luciano Sandonà, the documentary entitled The outdoor mobile school in Este – One hundred years later was presented yesterday at Palazzo Ferro Fini, seat of the legislative assembly of Veneto, in view of the conference scheduled for Saturday 28 May in Este with the local Pro Loco. And among the finds, in addition to the films of the Istituto Luce, there was one of the famous banquets with braces (“We recovered it in a municipal warehouse”) as well as historical photographs. Like those taken on June 21, 1954 in Venice, when some classes of the Pascoli di Este school held the lesson in Piazza San Marco. Listening to Maestro Gallana in that context was not easy: “We were distracted by all those architectural beauties, among other things, the teacher did not have a megaphone, there was no other type of sound amplification – the story of a former student – . But it was not a trip, that trip to Venice was, if anything, the demonstration that the state school educated its students well, imparting order and discipline ». A century later what remains? “The parallelism between tuberculosis that plagued the early twentieth century and coronavirus – observes the president of the Pro Loco, Riccardo Piva -: both have upset the world of school but have given time to experiment with new educational models”.