From My Notebooks In 1973: Zanfini’s Story

On October 18th I was still making my way down Italy to Sicily, and the ferry that would take me to North Africa. With my eyes firmly fixed on the unknown world ahead of me I wasn’t expecting to experience anything much worth recording, but in Roggiano, Calabria, I was reminded that the adventure can begin anywhere, when Giuseppe Zanfini made his operatic appearance in my life.

Please read last week’s notes first if you haven’t already.

Here’s what I wrote in my notebook:

“When I was eighteen, I was a fascist from my eyes to my boots.” His hands described the very ample parts of himself that included, but his plumply energetic features indicated that he was far beyond making excuses.

“I volunteered for the army to go to war. I was in officer school. Then in Sicily, four years after, came my first real battle. I heard the toot toot of the bugle “ – he went toot toot – “that meant go to prepare arms. I was in the tent to pick up my gun and clean it and I thought, this time it is not for a paper cut-out figure. This time you will have to kill real men, and I knew then that I couldn’t. Not to kill men with mothers like mine, with children – men who come from homes like mine which will be in misery.”

Short of wringing tears from his eyes Signor Zanfini relived his moment of conversion in front of me, behind his office desk. In a measured hush he spoke of love and brotherhood, his face flitting between solemnity and ecstasy. As the battle progressed he wiped blood – the blood of other men – from his face. He represented graphically how other men had lost a hand, an eye, a leg.

“After the battle the Colonel wanted to give me a decoration because I had stayed on my feet through the battle, but I refused. I told him I would never bring myself to kill another man. He said he understood but asked me only to keep my sentiments to myself. Three months later was armistice and the colonel was able to sign my permission to go to university. There in the new democratic Italy I studied to become a teacher and came home to Roggiano to teach others that we must have peace not war.”

“Then I saw that our men were returning from the prison camps and talking to their families at the fireside about the war. And then soon the children in the square were rushing around saying ‘Bang, bang’ and ‘Boom, boom’ playing at war. And I saw that although we had already lost one war, we were in danger of losing an even bigger one around the hearth.”

Zanfini was determined that children should not grow up to worship war. He propagandised ceaselessly, in school and out. In 1949 he joined in with the illiteracy campaign to open a small cultural centre in Roggiano. Nearly fifteen years later his energy and imagination (supported by his undoubted dramatic ability) has had great influence. It has drawn visitors, expert and student alike, from 84 centres to watch signor Zanfini’s cultural program at work in a peasant community. Both Swansea University and Manchester (through Prof. Ross Waller) have a permanent connection with Roggiano and send many students from undeveloped countries who may see how to tackle similar problems in Asia and Africa.

Because Roggiano is in Calabria, the heart of the Mezzogiorno and, at the end of the war, still largely cut off from the mainstream of European thought and progress. Now Zanfini is at the point of seeing his last and most extensive project realised. After seven years of bargaining and persuasion he has brought the mayors of the fourteen communes of Esore – seven Christian Democrats, four Communists, three Socialists – together to agree on one school for the whole region. A school not just for children, but for adults too. A centre where the skills learned by the children can be put to use by the community, where chemistry students can tell the peasants what their soil needs, etc.

He unfolded his plan and pinned it to the wall.

“All this,” he said – and there was a lot of it; some thirty buildings or more, with sports stadium, pavilion, theatre, and so on – “all this will cost only an eighth of what must be spent if each of the communes were to build their own necessary schools.

“Yesterday I had the councilors of the Regional Government of Calabria here to make their own final decision. They have agreed that it must go ahead. Now all we are waiting for is Rome and the law. The principle of comprehensive education was already accepted by the previous minister of education. But even if the Government said no, the people of Calabria would be determined to go through with it somehow.”

“Another march on Rome?” I suggested jokingly.

“No,” he said. “Never. There must never be another march anywhere.” And that same ineffable sweetness flooded his face, which only in Italy could carry conviction. “Peace and love. Love and peace.”

Now that he’s fifty he’s ready to retire. Area involved about 60 Km X 35

All decisions on community centre are unanimous.

Friday October 19th

Took pictures of Zanfini on 28mm lens. Then usual hour to pack everything. Got away about 10.30. Changed money in Roggiano. Every time the rate gets worse. In Rapallo 600 lire per $, in Rome between 583 and 575, in Roggiano 565, a 6% drop in value. What will it be in Palermo?