Teaching the Prince of Denmark: A School Diary Reviewed

Carla Melazzini's book (1944–2009) ranks among the sharpest ever written about Italian education—specifically middle school, the least documented but most complicated rung of the ladder. She writes with a language of deep engagement, full of questions, drawing on her frontline experience in the Naples suburbs. The cases she describes—early motherhood, incarceration, violence in every form—are handled with compassion but no sentimentality. Often Melazzini lets the students speak through their own writing, which communicates far more than any commentary could. It is not easy for these teenagers to leave the only world they know and venture onto new ground. Her shifting vantage points and accumulated experience allow her to overturn many classroom pieties, replacing them—like a magician drawing rabbits from a hat—with their opposites. The pages, part intimate work diary, overflow with reflections that illuminate the social and relational wasteland where an ever-growing percentage of young people are forced to live—in territories far wider than those she describes.