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Separate schools, by design
The detail that surprises Alex is the one that explains the rest. South Tyrol — Alto Adige, Südtirol — was annexed from Austria in 1919 and subjected to forced Italianisation under Fascism; the settlement that followed decades of post-war tension, and a campaign that included bombings in the 1960s, is the second Statute of Autonomy of 1972, and it is built on separation rather than mixing. Schools run in German, Italian or Ladin, each teaching the others as second languages; public jobs, housing and funding are allocated in proportion to the language groups as declared at each census; and every official document and place name exists in two or three versions. It is a deliberately unfashionable design — most countries pursuing minority protection would mix the schools — and it is widely judged to have worked, in the narrow sense that the conflict ended and the German-speaking majority of the province did not assimilate. The cost, debated locally and constantly, is that two populations can share a valley without sharing a classroom. Note that Italy recognises a dozen language minorities besides this one — Slovene, Albanian, Catalan, Greek, Croatian, Franco-Provençal, Occitan, Sardinian, Friulian and Ladin among them — and that the dialects of Lesson 81 are pointedly not on that list. Being a minority language in Italy is a legal status, not a linguistic one.