Schools, together with the church, are perhaps the only points of aggregation left in a town or neighborhood. The classroom door opens and a teacher enters, takes her place at the desk, opens the register, calls the roll and gets ready to teach. The teacher takes out some old photos of school groups: here are the photos of her grandparents, her father, her mother and her brother at school. Here are the photos of herself, because she too was a teacher for 13 years…, with her students. She will teach a real lesson, taking into consideration above all the personality of Don Lorenzo Milani. The common thread for the memories and considerations of the new “teacher” is the book Letter to a Teacher by the Students of Barbiana by Don Milani, a real basic text for those teachers who, especially in the seventies, tried to renew the structure of the Italian school system, still very close to De Amicis’ stories.
