Since the Day of Remembrance became Law, the relationship with the world of school has changed profoundly, so much so that even the final exams become a culmination of the activity carried out together, exiles and MIUR. In fact, for some years now, the tracks have also been inspired by the complex story of the Eastern Adriatic, namely Exodus and Foibe. But not only that, this year the step is also longer and involves the borders where the tragedy of the exodus took place and from where a decisive recomposition begins: in fact, the reflections of a great author like Claudio Magris have been chosen as the track.
“When I read the text given to the students, I was sincerely moved,” declared the President of ANVGD, Antonio Ballarin. “I think it is simply wonderful that Magris’s piece was chosen as the exam topic for this year’s final exams. It is sweet, it caresses the soul, but what is most striking is the fact that the MIUR leaders faced the drama of choosing a border with such delicacy, sensitivity and depth of analysis. I also spoke about it with Maurizio Tremul, President of the UI Council, who fully shares my position and my feelings.”
But what does the track assigned to the kids say: “There is no journey without crossing borders – political, linguistic, social, cultural, psychological, even the invisible ones that separate one neighborhood from another in the same city, those between people, the tortuous ones that in our underworld block the way to ourselves. Crossing borders; even loving them – in that they define a reality, an individuality, give it shape, thus saving it from the indistinct – but without idolizing them, without making idols that demand blood sacrifices. Knowing them to be flexible, temporary and perishable, like a human body, and therefore worthy of being loved; mortal, in the sense of subject to death, like travelers, not the occasion and cause of death, as they have been and are so many times. Traveling does not only mean going to the other side of the border, but also discovering that you are always on the other side too. In Verde acqua Marisa Madieri, retracing the history of the exodus of Italians from Fiume after the Second World War, at the time of the Slavic revolt that forced them to leave, discovers the partly Slavic origins of her family at that time oppressed by the Slavs because they were Italian, that is, she discovers that she also belongs to that world by which she felt threatened, which is, at least partially, hers too.
When I was a child and I went for a walk on the Carso, in Trieste, the border I saw, very close, was impassable, – at least until the break between Tito and Stalin and the normalization of relations between Italy and Yugoslavia – because it was the Iron Curtain, which divided the world in two. Behind that border there were both the unknown and the known. The unknown, because there began the inaccessible, unknown, threatening empire of Stalin, the world of the East, so often ignored, feared and despised. The known, because those lands, annexed by Yugoslavia at the end of the war, had been part of Italy; I had been there several times, they were an element of my existence. A single reality was both mysterious and familiar; when I returned there for the first time, it was simultaneously a journey into the known and the unknown. Every journey involves, more or less, a similar experience: someone or something that seemed close and well-known turns out to be foreign and indecipherable, or an individual, a landscape, a culture that we thought were different and alien turns out to be similar and related.
To the people of one bank, those of the opposite bank often seem barbarous, dangerous, and full of prejudices against those who live on the other bank. But if one begins to wander up and down a bridge, mingling with the people who pass over it, and going from one bank to the other until one no longer knows exactly which side or which country one is in, one finds benevolence for oneself and pleasure in the world.”
But what struck Ballarin and Tremul: “Beyond the theses dear to us – they reply -, now slammed and flaunted for one cause and now reviled, insulted and outrageously mocked for another, whoever chose that text wanted to make not only students reflect, but commentators, editorialists, journalists and public opinion on that subtle or shocking torment that still shakes those who are the children of a choice: that of staying on one side of the border. A choice is not something to be taken for granted. It is dramatic. It is tormented. It is painful. Some would like to go back on their steps but can no longer. Others would have
wanted to make that choice. Some carry anger, others resentment, others still wounds that have never healed even in the generations that followed. Then the sharpness of the text makes you reflect on the thoughts of those who stay and those who go. On the inconsistent logic of a border that can never limit the sense of identity and belonging, but that scars it, cancels it and causes others, who do not suffer the division, to consider non-existent the feelings of people who are an integral part of a Land, constitutive of it and yet uprooted by force or forcibly fenced in their own places, in the places where the soul finds its correspondence”.
Why is diversity so difficult?
“Slavic, 'talian', Venetian: what difference does it make if one breathes the same air, bathes in the same sea, tramples the same stones, kneels on common graves. The difference is in the minds of men but never in the essence of things. Thus Magris's text urges those who have not experienced the wickedness of a division and despises through ignorance, unconsciously, the human drama of those who remain and those who leave. It allows us to glimpse a common belonging to those who have experienced this drama and are still experiencing it today, incredibly, on their own skin, aware that only time, patience, affection, understanding, the
desire for good and rebirth, the boundless love for one's own land, regardless of a precarious line of demarcation, will be able to soothe every tear".
What do you want to say to MIUR managers?
"We must say thank you for their choice and thank you to those who chose to deal with this theme of 2013 that will remain in history. Thank you for having looked at an event that still today raises questions and queries on how to reunite a single people, never again enslaved to logics of division, to
concepts that only hurt in the minds of those who look to the West and search for a face, of those who look to the East and search for a home, of those who reach out to a stranger across a stretch of land and dream of a single identity”. (rtg)

The Adriatic Observer