When you enrol in high school in Italy (liceo in Italian), there are different ones you can choose to go to, depending on what subjects you’re good at.
You can go to liceo classico, where you’ll do lots of Latin and Greek, or liceo scientifico, where you study lots of maths and physics, and so on. I went to liceo artistico, where you have a lot of free time.
If we had, let’s say, three hours of drawing class, sometimes the teacher would say something along these lines: "Guys? I need to quickly pop out for, like, five minutes. Keep drawing and keep it quiet, I’ll be right back." He would then fuck off for the whole three hours, during which the class quickly descended into anarchy and lawlessness.
I always wondered, where the hell did he go for three hours? Did he go to the city centre to run some errands? Did he go visit his mistress for a quick shag? Who knows. (In my next life I want to come back as an Italian high school art teacher. Easiest job ever.)
Of all the teachers I had in four years there, there were only two we students were scared of. (All the others were either nice, decent human beings or, as I said, they simply didn't give a fuck about anything and they left us alone.)
The scariest of the two, by far, was our teacher of architecture, a man called Ermanno Lupi. (The word lupi means wolves in Italian, and that seemed quite fitting for him.) He was a strange man, really lax about certain things but incredibly strict about other things.
He was a heavy smoker (with yellow fingers and a killer breath), and not only he would smoke in the classroom (which was probably against the law), but worse yet he didn't mind if the students themselves smoked in the classroom. That's right.
The first day we had him, he walked slowly into the classroom, took a cigarette out, lit it up and then said "If any of you wants to smoke, that's fine." All of the students who were smokers didn't dare to take him up on the offer, expect two girls, who went ahead and lit one up too.
(They were the kind of girls who had long fingernails and much older boyfriends who would pick them up from school by car, if you know the type.) Even back then the whole thing felt really, really wrong.
But Lupi also demanded complete and utter silence during the class. And if anyone dared to whisper a single word while he was talking, he would fly into a rage. You could hear him through the walls. When he screamed his face would become all red and he would spit. I suppose nowadays someone like him would be diagnosed as bipolar, but for us he was just a horrible bastard. (Perhaps not a medical definition, but still a fairly accurate description.)
The second scariest, although nowhere near Lupi, was our teacher of Italian, a woman called Amalia Sciarretta. She was in her late fifties, she never married and lived by herself. (We students liked to gossip about our teachers.)
She was an intelligent woman (and a good teacher), and if you got to know her you realized that deep down she wasn't mean. (She was always willing to help any student who asked for her help, even in extracurricular matters.)
But she looked mean. She had a mean look on her face, if you know what I mean. She had dark, piercing eyes, angular eyebrows and a devilish smile. When she stared at you, it felt like she was gazing straight into your soul. You couldn't help feeling a bit intimidated by her.
The first day of high school is a daunting experience for everyone, I suppose. Partly because you don't know anyone, and partly because, while you still kinda looked like a little kid, the older students looked quite bigger. Especially the female students.
The way they looked and they way they talked seemed so mature, like actual women. As you can imagine, I found them both attractive and intimidating at the same time.
I remember there was a female student, in her last year when I started high school, who was what you'd call a goth, one of those sub-cultures that existed in the 80s. (You still see a few of them around.)
In Italy those people weren't called goths, though. They were called dark, one of those weird Anglicisms that find their way into the Italian language. (In Italy you don't go jogging, you go footing, for some reason.)
With her black clothes, purple lipstick and black nail polish you just couldn't miss her. To use an expression I cannot take credit for, she stood out like a cockroach on a wedding cake. And I mean that as a compliment.
I was slightly unsettled but also fascinated by her. There was an air of defiance. I suppose that if you walked looking like that in the streets of London, or even Milan, nobody would've noticed or cared. But Pescara back then was not quite like that.
(Of course it's different now. Nowadays they all look like weirdos. You can't swing a cat without hitting someone with died hair, face piercings and neck tattoos.)
One good thing about my school was that the student population there was overwhelmingly female. In my own class, out of 20-plus students, there were only six boys, including me. I liked that.
Conversely, my brother went to a different school, one for the mentally-challenged (just kidding, bro), and that school was a total sausage factory. (And if that wasn't bad enough, the school was right in the middle of a really dodgy neighbourhood.) Horrible.
Teenage boys are, together with pigeons and creationists, one of the stupidest forms of life on the planet. There was always some kid who would come to you and say something like this (I’m quoting word for word):
- Hey, Nacher, have you ever had a pussy around your neck?
- What?
- Have you ever had a pussy around your neck?
- Of course not.
- I guess you came out of your mum’s asshole, then.
Even back then I knew they were idiots. How we didn’t drive our female schoolmates into lesbianism in droves is beyond me.
I actually didn’t mind going to school. I had good friends, good grades and, after some initial struggling, I even managed to get a girlfriend.
To wrap it up I want to tell you about toilets. (Always a good topic.) If you went to the boys’ toilets of my school, you would have found the walls covered with graffiti, of course.
The strange thing was that 90% of those graffiti would be stylised drawings of penises. (The remaining 10% was information about which one of our female schoolmates was willing to do what.)
But back to the penises. What is it that compels teenage boys to draw male genitalia? Did they all belong to some secret phallic cult I didn’t know of?
When, in 1940, we discovered those cave paintings in Lascaux and saw pictures of men hunting cattle, we figured that people used to hunt cattle.
When, thousands of years from now, archaeologists will discover my school’s toilets, what conclusions will they draw when gazing at thousands upon thousands of penises?
