2024-04-05 09:21:57
I think I can say that today is the “cell phone” generation. They can be seen everywhere, in everyone’s hands, even on buses, and all speaking in the many languages of the now multi-ethnic Bolzano. They talk – the very young – with distant interlocutors, their fingers move nimbly on mini-keys between which the elderly struggle with difficulty, spelling. No, cell phones are no longer things for today’s white-haired passengers, who when considering this new youth think of distant years, when they, the elderly, were associated with the category of “youth, spring of beauty”.
Today these little miracles of a technology that allows a thousand things that were once unthinkable are in the hands of many very young people – but not only – and lead them to remember the school of the past, when they went there (perhaps by tram) carrying their steel nibs, to be dipped in the ink from the inkwells that were on the desks, and there were pens, and notebooks with differentiated lines for the various classes, from rods to increasingly smaller letters, and erasers for pencils and ink (the latter being a difficult task), and the pencils which were turned around the pencil and spiral shavings were then formed, freeing the carbon lead with which one wrote, and the pencils were also called lapis which however were not used much because it seemed like a foreign language, and foreign languages were forbidden (but lapis came from Latin!). And in the folder there was also the pen cleaner, which was made by mother with small scraps of multicolored fabric sewn together with two buttons on both sides. And there were also the squared notebook for mathematics and the lined one for Italian, with their clever wiping paper to absorb the ink, and there were the book and the subsidiary, with many beautiful color drawings and the stories that the teacher taught us, and in which the Duce was exalted, with a capital “d”, who had made our beloved Italy great. All these objects were enclosed in briefcases, which were made of leather for the children of the bourgeoisie – like me – and of imitation leather cardboard for the children of the workers who carried them on their shoulders, and while our fathers carried the leather handbags they bought, those of the children of the imitation leather workers were given as gifts by the Regime, which was written with a capital “r”, and these poor comrades of ours (so they said) after school while we went home for lunch, they stayed in school where they ate at the school lunch, that too for free.
And we were all part of the Littorio Youth: I was the son of the She-Wolf for two years (the She-Wolf was Mussolini!), and on fascist Saturdays I went around in uniform and went for training at the women’s GIL in Ponte Druso first, and then as Balilla I went to the men’s one in Via Vintola, and we marched singing the fascist anthems that I still remember, and I played the drum in the front row. We were taught that Balilla was the nickname of Giovan Battista Perassi, the boy from Portoria who “stands as a giant in history” because in Genoa he threw the first stone at the hated Austrians, thus starting an uprising (years later I understood that there was never a Balilla, but a Baciccia, which was the Genoese nickname of the Giovanbattista, and that the misunderstanding arose from the incorrect reading of a police report written in Gothic characters, where the “c” appear as “l”) . And then, it wouldn’t have been martial enough to sing “the sons of Italy are called Baciccia”! We were organized fascists, like our contemporaries of the Hitlerjugend in Germany and the “young pioneers” in the Soviet Union. These and other melancholy things remind white-haired passengers today of the kids of many ethnic groups, including ours, who know how to skillfully handle those infernal objects that are cell phones.
2024-04-05 09:21:57