Lucia Azzolina is a young professional, a teacher who suddenly found herself in possession of the ranks of senior officer in the first political and finally institutional line, even minister. A bit like what happens in war when, due to imponderable events, the chain of command is tragically broken: the general dies, he passes in turn the colonel, the major succumbs on a mine, he commits suicide exhausted the captain, touches at that point, for reasons of hierarchical precipice, the first-name lieutenant assumes responsibility for the operations.
Siracusana already in the Sicilian, or eastern, accent, where the Sicani correspond to the other hemisphere of the island, the minister Azzolina shows a bright and captivating face, the mobile proxemic of the eyebrows completes the rest, a perfect southern prof who found herself in to reach the deep North for reasons of professorships, predelle, can even be imagined in front of her locker in the teachers’ room, in this sense the verses of Dino Campana, I quote from memory, which they pronounce so might be fine for her “… the girls then had faces from ancient Syracusan coins”. The accent and the inflection, I repeat, confirm a certain character determination, the weight of the task it has taken on does the rest.
Let’s leave now the disputes that have been moved over time; the docimology, that is the didactic evaluation criteria, is in fact floating science, and I say this as the son of a teacher who kept at home the many texts on the subject published by the past editions of La Nuova Italia; let’s leave aside any talk about plagiarism, about how much it can be attributed to anyone to have copied to the right or left for pure spirit of intolerance to the study beyond the time allowed by the pleasure principle, let’s rather dwell on his recent test as an institutional guest in blue in Fabio Fazio’s aquarium at “Che tempo che fa” on Raidue.
That of the Minister of Education, whether public or not, has always been arduous and demanding work, a kind of punctual seasonal frontline government. There is no day in Viale Trastevere, on the steps of the Umbertine building where he lives, there is no union flags, whistles of precarious workers waiting to be stabilized or even a concentration of students ready to indulge themselves against the temporary holder of the Palazzo degli studi. In this sense, the inscription that for many years has camped on the opposite wall, “Falcucci fat”, comes to mind. Or the no less Syracusan coin of Vincenza Bono Parrino, to whom the Cultural Heritage was unjustly touched. Armchairs bristling with thorns, as in the illustrations of Giovan Battista Conti, the most imaginative illustrator of preconciliar catechisms, we still remember that the movement of ’77 exploded on a decree that bore the name of a minister of the same dicastery, a surname that was already in himself a stigma, Malfatti.
Rewinding the tape of past history, here finally arrives the minister Lucia Azzolina in connection with Fabio Fazio and the now recognized pop star of virologists, Roberto Burioni, dutifully guarding the sense of responsibility in times of pandemic.
You don’t seem like a joke, just like the friend Andrea Scanzi, unique and inimitable Biagio Antonacci of our journalism, could offer it to the world, and yet, seen from a distance, between the scenography framing an “Alamassunta” by Osvaldo Licini (the painter who , still in 1945, he wrote in his diary that Mussolini would certainly win the war, to say that talent is not an obligation; I forgot: Licini will then be communist mayor of Monte Vidon Corrado, his country, in the Marche) be mistaken for the umpteenth disguise of Sabina Guzzanti, in order of time devised immediately after the legendary “Unknown of the Democratic Party”.
What immediately stands out is the vermilion lipstick on the light, alabaster complexion, Guido Gozzano would say, on the wrist a dive watch in the glamorous abysses, a ring on the left thumb, concession, we read on the net, to “live the dream, the fantasy, the intimate aspect. In fact, the left part of the body is the one that expresses interiority: emotions, the unconscious and sensitivity. While, according to others, it indicates an introverted and dreamy character, but at times opportunistic “. The latter occurrence we exclude may concern ours. On the table, mysterious, threatening, a paperweight, perhaps in the shape of an Aztec sun or perhaps a work by Arnaldo Pomodoro, disseminator of his own totems in punctually ministerial lands.
Nothing, “silent scene”, to use a class register school lexicon, on a possible return to school date, on a possible post-Covid usability regarding our school buildings. On the whole, however, the clarification that there will be no “political 6”, a nice way of saying on behalf of the thirty-forty-year-old arrembanti that the baby boomers, implicitly accused of having claimed the revolution and aspired to the abolition of private property and at the establishment of free love, they are finally served, cut down. Ditto about the possibility that schools have a system that allows remote, remote teaching, and the latter word seems almost a metaphor between the lips of the minister.
In truth, there is a strong doubt that the imitating test tube can do better than Azzolina itself. On everything, at the end of the interview, as Valeria Rossi sang, three words remain: not sun-heart-love but, in our case, catapult, chicken coop classes and a big implicit “boh?” pronounced by the movement of the eyebrows, so compared to the school life that will be.
Girls and boys, you are in excellent hands.
