Ebook The Workers’ Young Schoolmistress

The Workers’ Young Schoolmistress was published in 1895 by Edmondo De Amicis, author of the unforgettable Heart. It is a long and very interesting tale about the school world and is set in a little suburb of Turin, St. Anthony, an industrial and working-class area, at the end of the nineteenth century. A simple story that, anyway, contains many important themes, first of all the one of education, with the description of the teachers’ life of that time, forced to live far away from their families in a new reality, the school, that represented for them also a new house and family, a closed world made of fears and social prejudices.Enrica Varetti, the heroine of the work, is a twenty-four-year old schoolmistress, daughter of a Major of Infantry, of noble family, grown up in a provincial boarding school, a figure of delicacy of features and manners, who, since as a child, has been having a fantastic terror of the populace, for which, anyway, feels a deep curiosity. She has obtained a job as a teacher at the evening school, attended by students from ten to fifty years old. She is particularly worried because fears the presence of peasants, workers, and school boys, with their manners and violent attitudes, and, above all, is terrified by the quick-tempered young man Muroni, called “Jump-the-window”, enrolled with the firm intent to seduce her. In the work there is a variegated and interesting succession of teachers, a parade of characters, each one with a particularly trait: the over-busy Mazzara, the hypochondriac Latti, the passionately fond of conferences Baroffi, Master and Mistress Garallo, always tied up with calculations, the fearful school caretaker and the General Inspector of Turin who, with his triumphal entry, arrives at the right moment to reprimand students and mistress. In a place where the punch-ups are at the order of the day and the gloomy snowy November nights resound with the shouting of the hunters of inns, Mistress Varetti finds very difficult to teach to all that crowd of lads and is forced to submit to the bullying and offences of the most ill-mannered and prone to anger students. However her real obsession is Muroni, who, in a first moment, bothers her with a series of wicked actions, but, by the time, falls in love with the young composed, good-mannered schoolmistress: his love is a real sensual love that leads him to a deep inner change, reason why starts protecting Miss Varetti against his comrades. It is just to take her side that he makes the umpteenth brawl: but this time he remains seriously wounded. So his mother calls for the mistress, who, at his death-bed, kisses Muroni allowing him to redeem himself before dying. A simple but intense tale who inspired the only surviving film of the Georgian poet Vladimir Majakovskij, Bàryšnja i chuligàn (1918).