Farewell to the ‘different teacher’ of Barbiana, Adele Corradi, who died at the age of 99

Adele Corradithe teacher who helped from 1963 don Lorenzo Milani to school in the small village of Barbianain the municipality of Vicchio del Mugello (Florence) until 1967, the year of the priest’s death, was died this morning at the age of 99 in Florencewhere she was born on 9 December 1924. Corradi also followed the entire collective editorial work of the volume “Letter to a teacher“, signed as Scuola di Barbiana. On his experience and knowledge of Don Milani, in the most difficult and exciting years of the School, Corradi, who throughout her working life she was a middle school teacher until the age of 67, he published the book “Non so se don Lorenzo” (Feltrinelli, 2012). She was “the teacher different from all the others”, to whom Don Milani dedicated a copy of the most famous of his letters.

The announcement of his passing was made by Don Lorenzo Milani Foundation with a statement on its website: “We rally around the pain of the large family of the prior of Barbiana and of those who loved Adele, councilor and also for us, teacher”. “Adele Corradi loved her prior and spent her entire life defending him from periodic accusations, making his teaching and his school known”, adds the Foundation.

In the his book “I don’t know if Don Lorenzo” we read in this regard: “It seems horribly offensive to me to even try to defend him. Don Milani defends himself. With everything he has done. And with everything he has written. But you have to read it in its entirety, not limit yourself to extrapolate a little phrase by interpreting it haphazardly. Reading his will, one understands that for Don Lorenzo the love of God could only be seen through love for his creatures. In Barbiana one lived in attention: Don Lorenzo not his boys there never lost sight of him. And, despite the master’s very strong personality, there was never any psychological dependence.”

Adele Corradi said: “They gave me a substitutethe first substitute in the state school, precisely in Borgo San Lorenzo. The principal told me about this school in Barbianawhere the boys did extraordinary things: they studied, they worked all day long”. So he had the desire to visit that school and when he arrived in Barbiana for the first time, Don Milani, as always in the afternoon, began the lesson by reading the newspaper. “I wanted to get to know this school because I was there fighting with kids who didn’t want to do anything and I was wondering: how does this guy get these results, does he have any recipes? A month later I went back. I arrived while they were having a lesson and I sat down to listen. Half an hour later, the kids had a ten minute break. Don Milani said to me: ‘Do you have any particular reason, madam, for coming back today?’ ‘Yes’ – I said – ‘I wanted to ask you how you teach to write Italian’ – because in an article I had read: ‘in our school we write when we are inspired. Nobody teaches.'”

So Adele asked Don Milani for help and he replied that that very day they would start a writing method that would be useful: “They were starting the letter to Mario Lodi. In the boys’ letter they describe what Barbiana is. In that of Don Milani explains how it was written.” Adele began to follow Barbiana’s school and Don Milani, however, wanted to make her understand that it was not just the method that was important. “One of the things we learned was collective writing, which respected the thoughts of others. And so I stayed in Barbiana”. In fact, shortly after, he moved to a house near the parish. He spent the mornings in the middle school of Borgo San Lorenzo and in the evenings he taught in Barbiana.

Corradi had said of herself: “For my entire working life I was a literature teacher in middle school. I retired at 67. I must confess that I was a teacher identical to the recipient of the ‘Letter to a Professor’. I I deserved all the reproaches that the kids from Barbiana direct at that teacher. That’s why there isn’t a word in the ‘Letter’ that I wouldn’t endorse. The meeting with the Barbiana School and with Don Milani dug a furrow in my life. I saw myself as I had never seen myself. And not only as a teacher, but as a person.” (by Paolo Martini)