It is a two-part television miniseries produced by RAI, from which a film was made for cinemas. It recounts the pastoral and pedagogical experiences of Don Lorenzo Milani, of the foundation in Barbiana, in Mugello, of a full-time popular school based on group work and intuitive teaching innovations. Don Milani, who had arrived in Barbiana, had observed the social hardship and poverty of the poorer classes in the area, the lack of work and the lack of opportunities for those children in the mountains to go to school. He was aware that only with education could they free themselves from poverty, find work, avoid exploitation. He was an uncomfortable priest. He experienced bitterness and misunderstandings both in the ecclesiastical sphere and in that of the well-thinking culture of the time. Don Milani was ill, he had little time left to live. He returns to his parish in Barbiana and retraces with his memory the events that marked his path, from the creation of the school in San Donato di Calenzano, to the didactic experience with the children of peasants, to the notoriety and controversy over his methods, to the preparation of Letter to a teacher, his pedagogical testament, printed posthumously and become a classic of 20th century literature.
Don Lorenzo Milani is now a classic of contemporary literature and pedagogy. His didactic and pedagogical ‘methods’ are universally recognised and are part of daily practice in many schools. Beyond his personal and albeit interesting biography of a great man of culture and a priest, devoted and obedient to the Church, but even more to the evangelical teachings that want the weakest and humblest in first place, in the fiction and in the film based on it, it is his insights and pedagogical innovations, his commitment to a school that is truly open to all that emerge. Don Milani taught children first and foremost to speak. He was convinced that only by enriching their vocabulary could they compete with the masters, who were stronger not only economically, but also culturally. Every word, therefore, had to be analysed, understood, and expressed in the right way to be effective. From there, long discussions and verifications until the realisation that a text could have its full structural validity, content, message. No textbooks, therefore, but construction of them, the fruit of countless readings, research, and personal experience of every aspect of reality that could be useful in life. No textbooks, but not even aberrant, boring and authoritarian lectures by prissy teachers full of self-importance, ready to pour out abstract knowledge, often useless and far removed from everyday life, and equally ready to fail their students if not adequately and sufficiently prepared according to their parameters. An image of an authoritarian and elite school made for the ‘Pierino’, children of the doctor that the prior of Barbiana strongly opposed and radically denounced together with his students in Lettera a professoressa (Letter to a teacher), a book published posthumously, in 1970, correctly considered his pedagogical testament. Another aspect that emerges from the film and which should not be underestimated is the characteristic of his school. It was private, but not denominational. It welcomed everyone regardless of religious belief and its strict observance. Above all, he welcomed the children of peasants and the disabled, all those who for various reasons could have been excluded from the public school, thus giving it all the characteristics of a public school as enshrined in the Constitution in Articles 33 and 34. Don Milani was an inconvenient man and priest. There was much dissent within the Church and the well-thinking world, both Catholic and secular. At Barbiana itself he came as a punishment. He spoke out against military chaplains in favour of military service objectors. He was forced, when his school grew in notoriety, not to attend meetings and conferences. They did not accept his ‘Sixty-eight’ attitude, that culture which, after his death, degenerated, dividing young people and Italian politics, even cruelly, and which he would never have shared. They did not forgive him for his determination, for having sided with the weakest, the poor, the workers, the unemployed, against all social injustice, and for having firmly declared that education is above all democracy, freeing from servility and exploitation.
Genre: biographical
Cast
Sergio Castellitto: Lorenzo Milani
Roberto Citran: Adriano Milani
Ilaria Occhini: Lorenzo Milani’s mother
Gianna Giachetti: Eda
Evelina Gori: Eda’s mother
Adelaide Foti: teacher
Adelmo Togliani: Francuccio
Arturo Paglia: Michele
Lorenza Indovina: Adele Corradi
Andrea Nannelli: communist demonstrator
Roberto Faggi: headmaster
Francesco Prando: writer
Soundtrack Luis Bacalov
