Quando ero piccolo — When I Was a Child

Growing up with the nonni

An Italian childhood is likely to have been organized around grandparents. With childcare expensive and scarce, i nonni collect children from school, feed them, and keep them through the afternoon, and the relationship is often as close as the one with parents. The school day helps: primary school in many areas finishes around one, which leaves a long afternoon that somebody has to fill. School itself looks different from the Anglo-American model. There are no school uniforms beyond a grembiule, a smock worn in the early years; the week traditionally included Saturday morning, though many schools have dropped it; and the oral exam, the interrogazione, is a defining feature — children are called to the front and questioned aloud, from primary school right through to university. The long summer vacation is genuinely long, around thirteen weeks from mid-June to mid-September, and the compiti delle vacanze, vacation homework, is a real and widely resented institution designed to fill it.