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While I was passing through Piazza Palermo, I stopped and looked at the old building which once was our school and, all of a sudden,
memories and emotions flooded my mind.
I seemed to feel the presence of "Uncle Willy, our Headmaster who used to come into the square to look for us and shephard us into our classrooms whenever there loomed a strike. On one occasion, when he came out to fetch us, we all rushed away and there remained just one of us, Gullotta, who was a big boy being two meters tall. The Headmaster Levi – who was not very tall - approached him hard-nosed and odered him: "Gullotta, bend down ‘cause I have to slap you.” Those were the days when the boys who attended our Marine School did not enjoy a good reputation in ‘bourgeois’ Genoa. Classes ended, if I remember correctly, at 12:45 and, at the sound of the school bell, we boys rushed to Liceo D'Oria, which was attended by girls. We were not welcomed by the "snobs "of that school. Verbal clashes and coming to blows were the order of the day. To avoid these close encounters, "Uncle Willy" had changed the time of the end of class but without success. So, he had worked for a reconciliation with the Headmaster of Liceo D'Oria, a reconciliation that took place with great pomp. I remeber Mr. Severino, teacher of Astronomy and Navigation, with his hieratic figure, his hooked nose and his white hair, who used ‘voi’ when addressing us, If someone was distracted, he drove him out of the class saying: "You, over there, get up, get out immediately and disappear!” I also remember Mr. Cozzo, teacher of Maritime Law, whose eyes brightened whenever he spoke about the ‘enjoyments of privileges’, which he pronounced as ‘enjooooooyment’ And what about the "carreras", the races on mini carts from Piazza Manin down Via Assarotti? Surely all this is school archaeology. It is about a world which has vanished from everyday life but has not been erased, and never will be, from the memory of those who lived it. |
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