Whenever we discuss disability, attention naturally focuses on those living with it. We worry about offering services to improve quality of life, ensuring the enjoyment of existing rights, advancing the integration process that has been underway for more than forty years. Rarely, though, do we think about the other side—those we can no longer call simply "normal" without adding quotation marks or the word "so-called."
The closing of special schools certainly marked the beginning of integration. But it also meant something important for everyone else: they suddenly had to live alongside people who seemed so different. That happened forty years ago, yet today the coexistence between disabled and nondisabled people still feels like an imposition, without warning for either side. The other person—the one with disability—was and remains a stranger, someone you don't know how to behave around. In their presence, we feel discomfort, embarrassment, fear, pity, guilt, sadness. We even decide what they feel and think, and we act accordingly—without checking whether we're right.
Italian law on disability, widely regarded as progressive, never put forward an educational policy to facilitate encounter, coexistence, and relationship-building at school. Everything is left to chance, to teachers' sensitivity or common sense, to children's capacity for mutual welcome. Forty long years seem to have passed without changing this.
The Girotondo Project addresses this gap, entering schools of every kind and level. Currently, it is led by two people with disabilities: Arturo Scarabotti, a blind man, and myself, Patrizia Ciccani, living with spastic tetraparesis—which means difficulty with speech and movement. We meet children and young people in their classroom for three hours, sitting in a circle. In this time and space, there is nothing that cannot be said or asked—even things that seem ugly or offensive, things we've been told shouldn't be said because someone, or our culture more broadly, has convinced us otherwise.
We make a pact with the students right away: "Let's pretend we've been friends for a long time. Friends can tell each other everything without worrying about offending." The initial hesitation disappears. Our stories shorten the distance. Disability loses the face of a terrible monster and becomes simply a characteristic people can live with peacefully. The young people learn that a blind person can live fully and independently. They discover unexpected possibilities, hidden capacities in themselves.
Role-playing games in our program serve exactly this purpose. Blindfolded, students must set the table. From the shock of not seeing, they quickly move to finding a way to do it. They explore, they try, and soon they feel deeply proud of succeeding at something they thought impossible just minutes before. Arturo's blindness sparks countless questions: Do you go around alone? How do you cross the street? Do you live by yourself? Who cooks? Don't you burn yourself? Do you remember colors? How do you imagine things? How do you shop? Do you go to the cinema?
We answer many through team games modeled on snakes and ladders, each square presenting a real-life situation involving disability that needs solving. With older high school students, we take a different approach. We offer a text containing a disability scenario, and in small groups they express thoughts and feelings, then share them with the whole group. What emerges becomes the material we work with.
Older students find it harder to be spontaneous, yet they too manage to say what normally cannot be said. They admit, for instance, that they feel pity—the hardest emotion to express in front of us. Recognizing feelings is the crucial first step toward building a relationship with someone who unsettles us. Once that barrier falls, the others crumble easily. Pity disappears, and a smile emerges. Then laughter.
Irony is a powerful teaching tool. Joking about our disability, teasing each other back and forth—it makes everything lighter and gives students permission to discover what's possible. Because we're joking together, not mocking someone. The distance keeps shrinking. The relationship becomes clearer, freer from contamination.
The Girotondo Project began in 1991 within a social cooperative in Rome, with supervision from the Chair of Special Pedagogy at the Faculty of Education Sciences at Roma Tre University. We worked in schools for many years, then took a break. Last school year, we began again as volunteers—free for schools that request us. Through collaboration with the Oltre cooperative, we've raised funds to cover our transportation costs, our taxis. Last year we reached about 500 young people. We'll meet as many this year. But returning to schools has forced us to face a bitter truth.
Integration of disabled students remains a mirage. The situation, save for rare exceptions stemming from individual teachers' excellence rather than institutional commitment, is alarming. A telling example: a blind child does not learn to read and write because no one in the schools knows Braille. How will he develop academically? What education will he leave with? Will he be able to live independently? To work? This isn't the only example, but it speaks clearly to the course schools have been on for years. Disability has become purely the concern of those who live it, not of the wider civil community. There's more—much more. That some schools, particularly certain classical high schools, have long been reluctant to enroll disabled students is well known and illegal. But for these same public schools to declare openly that their teaching is superior because their students include no foreigners, poor people, or disabled people—that is a clear signal of the dangerous path being taken.
The Girotondo Project is less than a drop in the ocean trying to turn this tide.