Stories from a school notebook

• … and they used to rinse clothes in the Ombrone
• After September 8th 1943
• Between the twenties and thirties
• Corrado Capecchi, military internee
  • A medal (at last) for Corrado
  • The joke of the military internees
• Five places of Romanesque Carmignano
• Friar Bocci, at the beginning of the twentieth century
• From archaeologists to farmers
• Gino Balena
• Gino di Fico
• Historical shops in Carmignano
• In the name of Jesus and Saint Peter, may the sty go away
• Liberation day
• Matteucci, the ‘forgotten’ bishop
• Soldier in Greece
• Stories from a school notebook
• Stories of donkeys and jockeys
• Stories of mayors and town councils in Carmignano
• Stories of our home
• Stories of war and displaced persons
• The Battistina and other scary stories
• The colours of the rioni
• The Golden Roster
• The last sharecropper in Carmignano
• The siege in memory of the Princess
• The tree of liberty in Carmignano
• Ugo Contini Bonacossi
• Vittorio’s bicycles
• When the river Arno was fordable ..
• When they were digging pietra serena between Arno and Ombrone
• The colours of Carmignano, a small guide for tourists
  • Ancient churches and abbeys. Montalbano, a crossroads for pilgrims.
    • San Giusto al Pinone
    • San Jacopo in Capezzana
    • San Leonardo in Artimino
    • San Lorenzo in Montalbiolo
    • San Martino in Campo
    • San Michele amarcord
      • San Michele, the theater takes to the streets
• Itineraries for just a few days or more
  • Walking through history and nature
  • A Sunday devoted to the discovery of Artimino
  • A few words about the hamlets of Carmignano
  • The Fontina and Castagnati Lake
• Guides to download

An old school notebook, is after all a small book of history or at least a collection of chronicles, the mirror of a society. Especially in a small town. Mara Bertini, at a class reunion dinner, fifty years later brought her old fifth grade notebooks. They had been kept in who knows which drawer and now they don’t even have a cover. There it was, the whole history of an era and a town, Comeana, at the flip of a page. There was the story of Cirano’s death, father of Anna, who was a stonemason like many other Comeanesi in 1952, the year in which Mara and the other boys were in the fifth grade, the year in which Cirano was crushed by a boulder. There was the inauguration of the radio, installed in the school by Bruno Farracani, the story of the Ombrone and many other essays on Garibaldi, Saint Francis and Italy.
The school was the same at the time (the town smaller), but perhaps there were more children. 1941 was a prolific year, so much so that that there were two fifth grade classes.  Since there were only six classrooms, the two classes alternated between morning and afternoon. It was maybe because of the war and the first leaves from the front. In the classrooms there were councillors and class presidents, pupils who corrected the homework and sanitation workers who checked if the pupils had ink on their hands. The school desks had inkwells. Few could afford to continue the studies, nonetheless some of those pupils from that fifth grade class even became a lawyer. Studying was particularly prohibitive for girls. “Was studying expensive? Mara explained, but above all, the mentality wasn’t there. “(wf)