The end of high school, high school, technical college or other path between the desks, represents a momentous transition after which one will no longer have to account to professors and principals, get up early in the morning and pack huge backpacks. After X-day, one will start in earnest, setting out on the narrow path of work commitment and on the, shall we say less bumpy, path of university academics.
The high school graduation exam is for many who have passed it in more or less distant times a bittersweet memory made up of tension, anticipation, tension and then days of celebration to mark the liberation from school. For those who have yet to go through it, however, that day appears like an uphill stage of the Giro d'Italia, a moment of enormous pressure that takes away sleep and focuses every possible energy and attention on themselves.
For the vast majority of students of all this will remain a memory, more or less vivid, the intensity of which will also depend on the spirit with which those years were approached. Those children who have devoted not an excessive amount of energy and neurons to their schooling will quietly leave behind those three mornings, interspersed in all likelihood with revelry and excess. Those, on the other hand, who have always considered it a priority to get a good result, a bright and round, two-zero grade as the seal of the secondary school cycle (a kind of equation, in fact), will keep every minute of those tests, awaited and dreaded, in their minds for years.
Especially those who belong to the first category are likely to ruin their post-exam nights, not all of them perhaps, with recurring and fierce nightmares that start with the arrival of a registered letter, in which the former student is asked to retake the baccalaureate exam because of a bureaucratic defect found years later. A bad dream that would arise from feelings of nostalgia and insecurity, enhanced by a situation of stress and contingent difficulty.
A nightmare that would be so realistic and distressing that it even inspired director Paolo Genovese, now 13 years ago, for his film Immaturi. Although back then, the current algorithm for calculating the final grade (between 60 and 100) broken down into: school credits + first test score + second test score + interview score + maturity bonus probably did not exist.
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They definitely belong to the other category, the one of students evidently more dedicated to their role, the more than 200 people in Florence who decided to participate in the Rimaturità, an event that the Galileo classical high school organized to revive the excitement of the Latin version, the anxiety of waiting, the satisfaction of the delivery of the papers (which we can imagine perfect and without smears or erasures).
Former students of all ages, from those of the pandemic period to those of the post-World War II era, gathered on the desks to celebrate, indeed re-celebrate the rite of passage, evidently affected by a certain nostalgia for those desks, those classrooms and for the smell of chalk, now probably permanently supplanted by limes.
The “kids” who found themselves walking those halls will also be awarded a commemorative medal while the school can rightfully boast of its ability to forge solid bonds with present and past students.
Illustration by Gloria Dozio - Acrimònia Studios
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