In Anti-Southern Racism and Education in Post-War Italy, Grazia De Michele explores the origins of practices against southern Italians who moved to the Piedmont region after the Second World War. Starting with a detailed study of the classi differenziali (special education classes) used to isolate the school-aged children of these immigrants, the author zooms in on documents and the lexicon adopted by teachers and administrators to record the ‘maladjustment’ of these children. She draws not only on documents and school archives but also on popular Italian magazines and photographs as well as the direct personal interviews that conclude the volume.

Grazia De Michele’s book is divided into four chapters. The first chapter, titled ‘Post-War South and Southern Migrants in Turin: Between Imagination and Reality,’ covers the construction of the South and southerners as ‘others’ during the postwar period, while the second chapter, ‘Educational Otherness’, focuses on the experiences of schoolchildren and how administrators and educators interacted with them, surveying a time span from the 1950s to the 1970s. Drawing testimonials from the teachers’ reports, the author uses the case of a boy from Monteburicchio who could not adapt to the new reality of the Piedmontese capital. Gianni felt uncomfortable both in school and in the city, spoke only dialect and was impacted by his new greyish and foggy environment and the reserved inhabitants all around him. After being reprimanded by his teacher, Gianni decided to leave school. The father approached the teacher some days after Gianni’s decision, to advocate for the well-being of his child. Upon his return to school, Gianni was welcomed back by his classmates who were now kinder and more sensitive to his situation. By the end of the school year, Gianni was able to succeed academically. The report was accompanied by a picture of Gianni, a sort of before-and-after image (from rags to clean apron) to signify that his conformity was paramount to his success.

The focus of the third chapter, ‘Southern Children and Special Education’, is the special education classes, known as classi differenziali. Established at the very beginning of the twentieth century and booming right after the war, these special instruction settings were very effective in perpetuating the exclusion of southern children. It was only at the end of the 1970s that they were finally dismantled. Indeed, the 1970s opened with a tragic event recorded by De Michele: the case of Ciriaco Saldutto, a fifteen-year-old Apulian boy who hanged himself after having failed the second grade of middle school. Widely-read magazines like Oggi and newspapers like La Stampa covered the case, criticising the school system and publishing pictures of the boy in bucolic settings that emphasised the contrast with the rigidity of the city. The fourth chapter, ‘Talking to Grown-Up Children’, is a collection of personal testimonies: the author records here the adult voices of those children who attended school in Turin during the 1950s and the 1970s.

The author has used sources like school registers, educational journals, scientific publications, popular newspapers and magazines, but she attests to the difficulty in accessing students’ direct experiential narratives: ‘In Italy, for example, even in the few cases in which school archival documents have been properly preserved, pupils’ exercise books and essays have been thrown away’ (p. 159). Nevertheless, there have been some initiatives made to preserve these documents, such as the Istituto nazionale di documentazione per l’innovazione e la ricerca educativa (INDIRE, 2022) and Quaderni di San Gersolè, a collection of pupils’ notebooks written between the 1930s and the 1950s in a small village in the Tuscan region. In addition to these sources, De Michele conducted interviews with 14 grown-up southerners who attended primary school in Turin as children and who were randomly selected, as the author met them during her fieldwork, in May and June 2009. The author admits to some surprises about her interviewees: their nuanced memories; the lack of complaints about their physical movement during childhood; the recollection, despite stereotypes, of their mothers’ roles, particularly in that time period; of their own mothers working both inside and outside the home; and the vague school memories. Due to these discoveries, the last half of this final chapter is devoted to the stories of five different individuals: two sisters, Alfonsina and Immacolata; Angela, who moved at four years old from Salerno and Rosario, who came from Caltanissetta at three years of age; and, lastly, Marcello. According to De Michele, their stories offer, respectively, more comparative input; a different perspective particularly based on gender and class; and finally, more insight on reasons to forget.

Anti-Southern Racism and Education in Post-War Italy is a much-needed volume since, as De Michele attests in her introduction, the otherness of southern children attending school in the northern part of the Italian peninsula between the 1950s and the 1970s has been thus far neglected by scholars. It is also a very easy-to-read, well-researched, and genuine book. It should be a must for educators but also for Italian Studies scholars and particularly those interested in class, gender and race issues.