Category Archives: Italy

bio, Italian education

Italian High Schools

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Some Observations from a Non-Italian Parent

The Italian public high school system is complex, with dozens of different types of schools, divided into two major branches, licei and institutes. The licei were traditionally the college-preparatory schools, while the technical and professional institutes were intended to put people directly into the workforce. I say “were,” because the distinction was officially eliminated by educational reform legislation in 1962. It took time for these reforms to percolate through the system, but nowadays students are accepted into almost any university program from almost any type of high school, although it is still true that some types of high schools prepare you better than others for particular areas of higher study.

Liceo is the traditional, rigorous college preparatory program: five years of studies culminating in the esame della maturità, a series of nationally-set written and oral exams. There were originally four types of liceo:

  • classico, where you study Classical Greek and Latin as well as the usual subjects – Italy’s is the only school system in Europe (and probably the world) where Classical Greek can still be studied in high school;
  • scientifico, with more emphasis on science, but also Latin (“promotes rigorous thinking” is the theory);
  • artistico, which was originally a four-year program leading not to the maturità, but directly to a fine arts academy (accademia delle belle arti), or to a school of architecture.
  • magistrale, designed to train elementary-school teachers, though I believe that nowadays new teachers at all levels also need a university degree.

There are also some new types of liceo:

  • linguistico, which offers a variety of foreign languages; and
  • Europeo, which in some cases seems to have a jurisprudence/economics focus – pre-law school?

The four-year liceo artistico has now almost vanished; my daughter and most of her peers are in a five-year program, called “experimental”. Artistico has the longest hours of any school, with 19 periods a week of studio art in addition to 19 hours of academic classes, and homework in both arenas. For the first two years, everyone does the same subjects, then they choose one of four areas of specialization: architecture, art conservation and restoration, visual arts (painting and drawing), and graphic arts (which involves at least some computer graphics).

May 16, 2004 – As we are learning the painful way, this curriculum is overloaded. There is no way that 14-year-olds can learn physics or algebra in two 50-minute periods a week; even the teachers tacitly admit this, by giving occasional extra classes after school. Ross and many of her classmates have needed extra tutoring this year in one or more subjects, and a number are likely to fail the year; we’re working hard to help Ross not be one of them.

The failure rate at Italian high schools is astonishing. I don’t have any hard numbers, but practically every kid I hear about has repeated one or more years of high school – at least there is no great stigma in being bocciato (flunked). Since school is only required up to age 15 [this has since changed], one girl in Ross’ class has already dropped out. Another is probably dyslexic, but her parents have apparently never figured this out, nor is the school offering any help, except to suggest that she shift to the four-year program with fewer academic subjects.

The core curriculum seems to be the same at all licei. Nobody graduates without having read Dante and Manzoni (Ross’ class is also reading Umberto Eco), and having reviewed world history starting (again) from prehistoric man. All schools now require a second language (usually English), and many offer a third (French or German). Judging from Ross’ courseload, they’re probably also all doing math, physics, biology, and Italian. In general, I have been impressed by the articulateness and cultural depth of Italian high schoolers, and their schooling clearly has something to do with it – when they survive it.

I know less about the institutes. They are trade schools, with a basic academic curriculum, plus specific preparation in a range of areas from accounting to hospitality to construction. Most institutes theoretically prepare you to go straight into a job, but in practice many graduates of the istituti choose to go on to university.

see also: The Italian Ministry of Education website

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The Post Office: An Italian Tradition of Bureaucracy

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I hope that my friends and relatives have forgiven me for the fact that I have never mailed presents to them from Italy. I either have something shipped directly from a company in the US, or I wait til I’m in the US myself, preferably actually visiting the person in question, to give gifts.

This is because I hate the Italian post office, which symbolizes all the worst of Italian bureaucracy: poorly organized, sluggish, and completely uninterested in self-improvement.

Part of the problem is that it tries to do too many things. As in other European countries, in Italy the post office functions as a kind of government bank, where pensions are withdrawn and some types of payments to the government are made, e.g. the annual television tax, and fees for school lunches. It is also possible to make payments to third parties, such as utilities, via the post office.

As you can imagine, this banking function leads to long lines, especially during the early part of the month when all the retirees show up to collect their pensions. And, in the early years, it somehow never occurred to anybody in authority to separate postal functions from banking functions: same line, same window, whether you were paying a bill, collecting a pension, or just trying to mail a letter.

If you only needed to mail a letter, you could always buy stamps at a tabacconist. But registered letters could only be registered at the post office, and, given the unreliability of the delivery service, it was necessary to register anything whose delivery you actually cared about. Once, after standing in line for half an hour behind little old ladies carefully counting their coins, I asked the man why they didn’t have a separate window for just plain post. He gave a bored shrug. “This is the way it’s done.”

Yet, six months later, they started doing it differently: suddenly we had one window for any kind of mailing, one for stamps only, and three for banking. At first I heaved a big sigh of relief, but I soon realized that they had assigned the dimmest bulb in the office to the post window. It would take him ten minutes to figure out postage (they were still doing it by hand then) and fill in (again by hand) his part of the registration form. Sometimes he gave me the wrong form, so I would have to fill things out twice. Once, on a very urgent item, he called me when I had returned home and told me I’d have to come back and pay more, because HE had made a mistake on the postage. And he wouldn’t send this urgent letter until I’d come back and paid.

The banking function didn’t work so well, either. Each payment slip had three portions: one that vanished into the system (although the transaction was also recorded on a computer somewhere), one that you gave to the payee to prove you had paid, and one that you were supposed to keep. Unfortunately, I did not realize how critical it was to keep these receipts for the rest of your natural life. We were dunned for payment, three years after the fact, for three months of Rossella‘s 5th grade school lunches. I had entered into our home accounting system the date that these had been paid, in a single transaction, but had not kept the receipt to prove it. Enrico spent days in postal administrative offices all over Milan – the system was centralized enough to accept payment from anywhere, but not enough to allow the local branch to trace a payment that they had taken. The amount of money was not huge, but Enrico got stubborn about it, and eventually prevailed.

Another fun thing about banking in the post office is that it means that, during the early part of the month, a relatively insecure office is holding enormous amounts of cash, and doling it out to tottery old ladies. This leads to regularly-scheduled muggings and fleecings of old people just outside the post office, and to the national sport of post office robbery. I once arrived at our local PO in Milan to find a robbery underway, with a huge crowd milling outside to see what was going on. I hightailed it in the other direction.

The good news is that global competition has affected even the Italian postal system. Mail now arrives more quickly and reliably than it ever has in the past, and many post offices have become sleek, computerized, and almost a pleasure to be in. It’s no longer necessary to register everything; priority mail seems to be fast and trustworthy.

Now I’m making a real test of the system: I mailed my first-ever package from Italy, to my mother, a few weeks ago. It was a heavy book, so I didn’t send it priority, and I’m therefore not surprised that it hasn’t arrived yet. If it eventually gets there, I’ll be pleased, and maybe not even too surprised.

Feb 22, 2004 – I am happy to report that my mother received her book a day or two after the above went out.

Feb 23, 2006

I must say, the Poste Italiane are really modernizing. You can do a lot of stuff online now (such as track a registered letter), and their site even has an English version.

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bio, living in Italy

Strikes and More Strikes

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Italy’s 155,000 public medical employees are on strike today, led, with unusual unanimity, by all 42 of their unions. The major issue is that their contracts were due to be renewed two years ago (I suppose that implies cost-of-living increases, at least), and have not been, due to disagreements between the federal and regional governments over who should pay. The medics have also issued a multi-point protest document demanding the de-politicization of hospital appointments and more control by the medical personnel of their shifts and how their work is organized, which seem reasonable demands.

Alitalia is also on strike, protesting a restructuring plan for the struggling airline which would cut at least 1500 jobs. I don’t sympathize with this one. The entire airline industry is in trouble; why should we taxpayers pay to keep an ill-managed national airline afloat when better and/or cheaper flights are widely available? I fly low-cost airlines so I can go more places, more often, but I lose that advantage if I also have to pay more taxes to benefit Alitalia employees.

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Italy travel

Dressing for Italy: Tips for Tourists

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^ top: Ross & Enrico – dressed for a wedding, I admit

Foreign travelers to Italy sometimes ask how to to dress so as not to look out of place among the fashionable Italians. This question is hard to answer; much depends on your sex, age, and personal style.

It’s easiest to start with some fashion don’ts:

  • No track suits, sweat suits, or the like, and no baggy sweatshirts. Well, really, no baggy anything.
  • No fanny packs.
  • No daypacks or backpacks, unless you’re in your 20s or younger.
  • No clunky white sports shoes. Younger Italians do wear sports shoes, even when not doing sports, but these are usually sleek and stylish models (including some brands very familiar to Americans), and are never dirty or scuffed or worn down.
  • No t-shirts, especially not with big pictures or slogans on them, again, unless you’re under 30.
  • No shorts, especially not for men.

Now some do’s:

  • In general, Italians dress more formally than Americans. Blue jeans are fine, as long as they are well-fitting, clean, and in good condition (or any damage is intentional and fashionable) – Levis are very trendy and even expensive in Italy.
  • Men, always wear collared shirts (polos are okay).
  • Wear dark or subdued colors, except in summer. Even then, Italians wear white or pastels, not the bright purples and blues that many Americans like.
  • As a tourist you’ll be walking a lot, so I do recommend very comfortable shoes, even though this seems never to be a consideration for Italians, at least not for women, who routinely walk all over town with things on their feet that I couldn’t even stand up in.
  • Designer labels are always a plus.

Of course, how you dress is always entirely up to you, and no one is going to jeer at you even if you commit every single one of the fashion “sins” listed above. The question I’m responding to came from people who wanted to know how to fit in, and that’s what I’ve done my best to answer, with some expert advice from my Milan-raised, extremely stylish, teenage daughter. (I admit I cheated – in the photo above, my daughter and husband are dressed for a wedding!)

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bio, what I do, working in Italy

How I Got My (First) Job in Italy

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I don’t claim to be a comprehensive resource on any aspect of living in Italy; my reasons for being here are different from some others’: I married into it, which made getting a visa (permesso di soggiorno) and permission to work relatively easy. And that was years ago, so what little I remember about the process is probably out of date. There are sites with expertise to offer about the law and other technicalities; you’ll find some listed here.

When I first arrived here, I had been a mostly stay-at-home mom (in New Haven) since Rossella’s birth, and I was ready to go back to work. I had very little experience in job hunting anywhere, let alone in Italy. One of my major saleable skills was desktop publishing, which in those days was still an arcane art that could be sold as a third-party service. The closest thing I could find in the Milan Yellow Pages was “editoria elettronica”. Neither Enrico nor I was sure what that meant, but I sent off a resumé and cover letter to each of the four or five companies listed. Deafening silence ensued.

I pounded the pavements, taking my resumé to computer firms that might need someone who knew how to put systems together and train people to use them. Showing up with a resumé at an office where no one knows you is not the done thing in Italy; people stared at me uncomprehendingly, and at one place they literally laughed in my face.

I didn’t know what else to do to find computer work. Contacts are all-important in Italy, and I had none in the high-tech field. I did get a few translation jobs, thanks to my father-in-law. This was also the period in which I accidentally became a computer journalist. I could have taught English, but the idea didn’t attract me, and I didn’t want to fall into teaching as a career when I had other skills that ought to be far more valuable.

In June (1991), Enrico had a chance to return to Yale for an academic visit, and Alitalia happened to be offering two-for-one tickets. I figured that, if I couldn’t find work, I might as well go on vacation. So we left Rossella with her grandparents and prepared to take off for a week. This was on a Sunday morning. We were putting luggage into the elevator when the phone rang. I answered it, and the conversation went more or less like this:

“My name is Caffarelli. I received your resumé a while ago. Could you write a software manual?”

“Uh, yes, I guess so.”

I had never actually written a manual, but I had designed and written course materials to train people in using desktop publishing software, and had worked with a friend on a manual he had written for a deep-ocean exploration and recovery apparatus. I didn’t think I’d make a fool of myself in the attempt, at any rate.

When I returned from the trip, I went to meet Fabrizio Caffarelli, who had founded a software company in Milan a few years before. The software in question was for optical character recognition, which I actually knew something about – I had beta-tested some scanners and software, back when a 100 dpi black-and-white scanner cost $10,000. So I wrote the manual, in English, and it was “simultaneously” translated into Italian by Fabrizio’s niece Cristina. We had a great time doing it.

At the end of the six weeks or so that the project took, Fabrizio said to me: “I like the way you work but, unfortunately, I don’t have any more work for you right now.” We parted on good terms, and I recommenced the job hunt (well, not until September — no one does anything in Italy in August). I wrote a few more articles for computer magazines, and began to wonder whether I could write a book about something computer-related, perhaps in Italian. I was casting about for a topic when Fabrizio called, sometime in November. “Would you like to write a book with me?” he asked.

So we wrote Publish Yourself on CD-ROM, published (in English) by Random House. It was one of the first books in the world to include a CD. We didn’t get paid much for writing it (and Fabrizio took the lion’s share of what little there was), but I made some extra money on the deal by desktop-publishing it myself, using FrameMaker software. I also used FrameMaker to create a hypertext version of the book to go on the disc, a skill which was to come in handy later on. The disc mainly contained a demo version of Easy CD 1.0; Fabrizio’s reason for writing a book was to publicize the software by showing how easy it could be to make your own CDs – if you had our software, of course.

By the time the book was published (January, 1993), I was working full-time for Fabrizio, writing software manuals and other materials, and doing just about anything else that came up. (The small-company environment suits me precisely because I get to wear a lot of different hats, and people aren’t so territorial about their jobs.)

Fabrizio moved the engineering team to California in late 1993, and, having conquered the 75% of the worldwide Windows market for CD recording software, sold the company to Adaptec in August, 1995. I was hired by Adaptec and had a very good run with them, and later with the Roxio spin-off, until I quit in 2001. Along the way I helped a few other people find work (hired some myself), in Italy and elsewhere. Most of the freelance work I’ve had since has come through friends: good karma pays off, I guess.

In sum, it’s hard to advise anybody on how to find work in Italy, except in these very general terms: be flexible and patient, meet a lot of people, and when opportunity knocks, be ready to leap on it.

Multitasking

Feb 4, 2004

I said, “I developed a new skill with Fabrizio: simultaneous translation and transcription. If he wanted something written in English, he would dictate it to me in Italian, and I would type it straight out in English. I’m not sure I could do simultaneous translation if I had to speak, but I can do it typing, as fast as he can talk.”

Mike L. responded: “According to recent studies, this is something that (almost) only women can do. The explanation behind this is that the female brain is better capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously, such as translating and writing. The experiments were quite funny to watch. One person would read a series of words, while the test person was asked to repeat after him. Most of the females managed to speak just a single syllable (sometimes even less) behind, while most of the males had to wait longer. My explanation is that males are equally well capable of multitasking, but one task is constantly allocated to thinking about sex – sex – sex…

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