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    Italian Sketches: The Faces of Modern Italy
    Italian Sketches: The Faces of Modern Italy
    Italian Sketches: The Faces of Modern Italy
    Ebook189 pages1 hour

    Italian Sketches: The Faces of Modern Italy

    By Deirdre Pirro

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    About this ebook

    The icons of contemporary culture finally find a forum in Italian Sketches: the faces of modern Italy, a book that dares to investigate the whos and whys behind one of the world’s most-loved countries. Drawn from Pirro’s column in The Florentine, Tuscany’s English-speaking newspaper, Italian Sketches portrays a nation whose modern cultural landscape remains largely undiscovered.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTHE FLORENTINE PRESS
    Release dateNov 23, 2015
    ISBN9788897696124
    Italian Sketches: The Faces of Modern Italy

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      Book preview

      Italian Sketches - Deirdre Pirro

      Armani

      Ideas and industry

      In 1896, Maria Montessori became a pioneer in Italy by being its first woman graduate in medicine. This achievement alone would have made her famous, but she went on to revolutionise education, changing the way we think about children’s intellectual development, making her a household name around the world. In fact, today, there are over 8,000 Montessori schools everywhere, from Italy to China, Russia to India, Ireland to Sri Lanka, with 4,000 of them in the United States alone. Montessori’s theories have become so influential that the United States, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands have incorporated Montessori schools within their public education systems.

      Born into a middle-class family in Chiaravalle, a small town near Ancona, on August 31, 1870, Montessori was the niece of Antonio Stop-pani, a celebrated Italian geologist and palaeontologist. Always interested in the sciences and encouraged by her mother, she originally studied engineering before switching to medicine. After graduating from La Sapienza University in Rome, she began her career at the Santo Spirito hospital in same city working with ‘idiot-children’, as they were called in those days. In 1896, she became the principal of a school for training teachers of mentally retarded children, and between 1899 and 1900 she taught at a college for women in Rome. Her next appointment, in 1901, was director of the new Orthophrenic School, a former asylum for ‘deficient and insane’ children. At the time, children in these kinds of institutes were kept isolated in closed, empty rooms, without any proper care, cleanliness or stimulation. Sensing that this brand of treatment was inappropriate, she studied psychology and pedagogy and began working on developing materials to encourage their mental development. Because the Ministry of Education would not allow her to experiment on normal school-aged children to verify the successful results she had attained with ‘deficient’ youngsters, she jumped at the chance in 1907 to co-ordinate a day-care centre for preschool working-class children in San Lorenzo, a slum in Rome. Thus, in the midst of the appalling conditions in which these children lived, the first Casa dei Bambini or Children’s House was created. There, by trial and error, she tested her method and ideas often saying afterwards ‘I studied my children and they taught me how to teach them’.

      Montessori believed that advancing a child’s reasoning power was the cornerstone to its development. By fostering their ‘natural desire to learn’ and desire to ‘learn by doing’ in a sound environment, teachers could help children achieve self-determination and self-realization. She created puzzles and perceptual training materials as well as a series of exercises based on simple activities taken from daily life. These aimed at arousing the children’s interest, enabling them to face challenges and to judge their own progress. The teacher was not an instructor but merely a ‘keeper’ or guide in a classroom that was filled with furniture and objects like bowls and kitchen utensils—miniaturised to suit its small inhabitants. Based on her experiences in the Casa dei Bambini, Montessori published her first book in 1909 and began giving courses on her method which quickly became an international success. Soon many other books and courses followed.

      Social activist and author, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, took the Montessori method to the United States after meeting Montessori in Italy in 1912. The heroine of Fisher’s much-loved children’s book, Understood Betsy, first published in 1916, is sent to a Montessori-style school in Vermont. But Fisher was not Montessori’s only advocate. In 1913, Montessori was invited to the United States for the first time by a group of Americans that included Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. In 1915, she returned to speak at Carnegie Hall and attend the San Francisco World Fair. Regrettably, enthusiasm for her theories diminished significantly when, in 1914, William Heard Kilpatrick, a disciple of the educational reformer, John Dewey, and an advocate of the ‘project method’, wrote a scathing critique of her method. Unfortunately, it would not undergo a revival in America until the 1960s.

      In 1917, Montessori opened a research institute in Spain and, in 1919, began teacher-training courses in London. Three years later, she was appointed an inspector of government schools in Italy. At the 5th World Conference on New Education, hosted by the New Education Fellowship in Elsinore, Demark, in 1929, she founded the Association Montessori Internationale to perpetuate her work.

      In 1934, after the systematic closure of all Montessori schools in Nazi Germany, and because of her increasingly conflictive relationship with the Fascist regime, she and her son Mario left Italy for Spain.

      In an epoch when it was considered shameful to have an illegitimate child, Mario, the fruit of Montessori’s relationship with psychiatrist Giuseppe Montesano, had been raised by another family and was not told she was his mother until he was 15. When they eventually began travelling together, she first described him as her nephew and then as her adopted child; she publicly acknowledged him as her son only just before her death. Nonetheless, he grew to be her closest collaborator, confidant and heir apparent.

      Forced to leave Barcelona because of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Montessori presented her ‘Erdkinder-plan’ on secondary education at the Fifth International Montessori Congress in London. In 1938, she decided to settle in Holland, but, in 1939 the theosophist George Sidney Arundale invited her to visit India, where he had been successfully using her method to combat illiteracy. Owing to the outbreak of World War II, she and Mario were unable to leave. Profoundly influenced by Indian philosophy while she was there, she began developing her ideas for an ‘education for a new world’.

      After Montessori returned to Holland in 1946, she was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize based on her education for peace curriculum because one of her main tenets was that ‘avoiding war is the work of politics, establishing peace is the work of education’. She continued to travel and teach her method until she died in the Dutch city of Noordwijk on May 6, 1952, just before her 82nd birthday.

      Even if she is considered a quasi-cult figure by many, Montessori’s ideas still provoke hot debate. Detractors accuse her of creating an elitist school that leaves children too much freedom without adequately stimulating their social interaction. As researchers continue to explore the efficacy of the approach, recent studies in the United States have shown that Montessori students perform better than do ordinary public school students, especially in poorer inner-city areas.

      Italians and pasta are like a horse and carriage: they just naturally go together. The very idea of depriving Italians of their beloved pasta seems crazy, but Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the poet, novelist, critic and founder of Italy’s Futurist movement, tried to do just that, although, as grocery stores and cookbooks everywhere indicate, without much success.

      Born of Italian parents in the Egyptian city of Alexandria on December 22, 1876, Marinetti became an established poet in Paris at an early age. After a life-changing but not serious car accident in 1908, he began to write a series of manifestos. The first was his ‘Futurist Manifesto’, published in February 1909. Although it appeared in Le Figaro newspaper in French, it declared that ‘It is in Italy that we launch this manifesto of tumbling and incendiary violence, this manifesto through which today we set up Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, of archaeologists, of guides, and of antiquarians.’

      Futurism’s idea was to break with nineteenth-century Romanticism and eliminate the past by embracing speed and the modern industrial revolution in all aspects of life, including art, architecture, music, poetry, films, fashion, physics and technology. Not surprisingly, its chosen symbols were the aeroplane, cinema and the telephone and, above all, the automobile. As a movement, Futurism quickly spread to Germany, Russia and the Americas. It rivalled Cubism in its influence on other twentieth-century art movements including Art Deco, Surrealism and Dadaism.

      Almost all the major themes of Futurism are explored in Marinetti’s theories about food. A superb communicator, he first launched his ideas about the cuisine of the future in a radio broadcast from the Penna d’Oca restaurant in Milan in 1930. The same year, he published his ‘Manifesto of Futurist Cooking’ in a Turin newspaper, followed, in 1932, by the publication of the La Cucina Futurista, containing 172 recipes and polibibite (cocktails). Not unexpectedly, he sought to revolutionise ideas about food and eating habits which he and Luigi Colombo ‘Fillìa’, with whom he had written the cookbook, experimented in the avantgarde restaurant the Fururists opened in Turin, Taverna Santopalato (‘Tavern of the Holy Palate’). Designed by the Futurist architect Nicola Diulgheroff, it was aluminium clad from floor to ceiling, with illuminated columns and porthole windows.

      Eating was made a sensual experience. The food was sculptured in shape and colourful, and perfumes enriched its taste and smell. The diner was stimulated by eating a startling combination of sweet and savoury flavours while stroking a piece of velvet, silk or sandpaper during his meal. However, as speed was of the essence, a serving might be merely one mouthful or less. Knives and forks were abolished and traditional kitchen equipment was replaced by scientific implements like ozonizers to make food smell like ozone or ultraviolet ray lamps to activate vitamins.

      Marinetti’s main objective was, however, to abolish pasta. He believed pasta ‘mentally paralysed’ the Italians and made them lethargic, pessimistic and sentimental. He thought that those who defended pasta were ‘shackled by its ball and chain like convicted lifers, or carry its ruins in their stomachs like archaeologists.’ For him, being anti-pasta was part of being anti-past.

      Marinetti’s no-pasta menus included dishes like Taste Buds Take Off, a soup of stock, champagne, and grappa decorated with rose petals; the Excited Pig, a whole salami cooked in strong espresso coffee, flavored with eau-de-cologne; Chicken Fiat, a chicken roasted with ball bearings inside and garnished with whipped cream; and Italian Breasts in the Sun, two half-spheres of almond paste each with a fresh strawberry in the centre, sprinkled with black pepper.

      A convinced warmonger who, as the ‘Futurist Manifesto’ stated, wanted ‘to glorify war—the only cure for the world’, Marinetti was quick to embrace Fascism and became a personal friend of Mussolini. (His were no idle words: in keeping with his beliefs, Marinetti fought, and on December 2, 1944, after returning at age 66 from his last military campaign as a volunteer with the 8th Italian

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