"It’s never too late": the lesson of maestro Manzi

Perhaps the most significant homage was dedicated to him by the very small town of Tufo, on the L’Aquila Apennines, where his mother Rina came from and gave birth to him on 3 November 1924 in Rome. Alberto Manzi was “the” teacher, not one of the many elementary school teachers, and the colored mural recalls him in a village of just over three hundred souls, one of the many who at the beginning of the last century fought against the elements of an unconventional Nature. always benign and where illiteracy was widespread. Manzi, it is estimated, literate not legions of noisy schoolchildren but about one and a half million adult Italians, to whom he taught to read and write using a medium that had just begun to show its overflowing potential: television.

A program broadcast from 1960 to 1968 and copied abroad

«It’s never too late» was the title of a program and an exhortation to make up for lost time, so as not to feel marginalized and isolated in not knowing how to decipher letters and in expressing oneself in a language different from the many local dialects that raged along the Peninsula and who communicated nothing to each other. It was not at all late, as Maestro Manzi had intuited, convinced that he could do something for those who had not been able to attend school and had not been able to learn. It was 1960, and on November 15th Rai from Turin, in collaboration with the Ministry of Public Education, introduced a polite and original teacher in his teaching method. It is said that on that first occasion he immediately freed himself from the script, relying on the naturalness of a lesson in class, without pedantry, to ignite curiosity and cultivate interest. In thirty minutes, before dinner time, a lesson in style and educational public service was broadcast, not just in a manner of speaking. That master had himself followed, ignited the spark of knowledge and led by hand and with confidence into the labyrinth of the written and spoken language in which the world of adults, especially in rural areas, thought it could no longer find its way.

An original and captivating style and guests like Bartali and Fabrizi

At his “Popular education course for illiterate adults” there was a blackboard, as in every classroom, and a large pad of paper on a support, where Manzi wrote and drew even for the cameras: explanatory images corroborated by films and audio, explaining things and concepts according to an innovative system. There was no shortage of jokes, comic sketches, stories, famous guests, such as the actor Aldo Fabrizi for the episode on the letter “F” and the cycling champion Gino Bartali for the one on “B”, and even the students of a certain age in the studio. And at home, meanwhile, we learned. The first revolutionary episode, strictly live, was followed by another 483 signed by Manzi, Oreste Gasperini and Carlo Piantoni, until 1968. A crucial year, from a social point of view, but in which enrollments and attendance in primary schools had grown exponentially. The curtain fell on “It’s never too late”, but the lights did not go out on that experience of fighting illiteracy and linguistic unification, because it remained an example, so much so that it was everywhere praised and taken up equally from 72 countries around the world.

The “great refusal” of judgment and the provocation of the same tone for all

Maestro Manzi, awarded the title of Knight of the Republic almost immediately, returned to doing what he wanted and knew how to do: teaching and writing educational texts and books for children. Among his titles, «Orzowei, from 1955, which Rai translated into a television series in the 1970s with great public success. He had not been forgotten at all, but returned to the foreground in the news, as a teacher in the “Fratelli Bandiera” elementary school in Rome where he remained until his retirement, because in 1981 he refused to replace grades with judgments, introduced with evaluation forms from one of the many reforms. They suspended him from teaching and from his salary, then someone realized that it hadn’t been a very intelligent decision and so he tried to mediate. He, with a fine sense of humor, came to terms by coining a single opinion, «He does what he can, he doesn’t do what he can’t», to be written on a stamp, and when the Ministry objected, the system simply “corrected” itself by saying which he would then write by hand.

The homage of a Rai fiction and a mural in the village of Tufo

Times had changed but as in the 1960s it was never too late to educate yourself. In 1992 Rai thought of him for a literacy program aimed at foreign immigrants. In 1995 he also had a brief political experience as mayor of Pitigliano, in the province of Grosseto. Maestro Alberto Manzi died on 4 December 1997, at the age of 73. If the village of Tufo (Carsoli) dedicated a mural to him, Rai paid homage to his memory in 2014, having him interpreted by Claudio Santamaria. A fiction in two episodes, which at the time of «It’s never too late» was called a television drama: with this formula Anton Giulio Majano brought the great classics of literature into the homes of Italians, from «Black Arrow» by Robert Louis Stevenson to «And the Stars Watch» by Archibald Joseph Cronin. On the other hand, the branch of Rai that has collected that cultural and educational heritage, which unfortunately has become completely marginal in the programming, is called Educational: another anglicism sign of the times, in a contemporary world in which illiteracy has disappeared thanks to figures like Manzi, but it resurfaces here and there in the subtle form of return and lack of culture.