What we wanted to talk about in our Italy workbook
With all of our workbooks we try to give a broad outline of a country, covering all the ‘crucial’ bits while still keeping the content engaging for kids (read: no long, historical or political diatribes or overloading on dates). Of course, in practice that’s much harder than it sounds. Nevertheless, we make a big effort to include information that goes beyond the stereotypes and basic information of different countries. This series is designed to give you a quick look into why we made the choices we made, and which bits of the workbook we’re particularly proud of.
Our Italy workbook is our 22nd workbook, released in July 2021. As an incredibly diverse, rich, well-documented country at the centre of the European renaissance and classical history, there was plenty to write about. Here are a few things we wanted to draw particular attention to with the Italy workbook.
1. Avoid being too Rome-centric
There’s a lot for kids to find fascinating about Ancient Rome. Gladiators, the Roman Army, stabbing Caesar outside the Senate, mosaics, statues, Pompeii, Roman baths, Roman roads and loads of crazy Roman Emperors.
(These are my favourites)
But, a lot of Rome-centric content for kids already exists. We don’t need to recreate our own version of the history of ancient Rome, because loads of great stuff already exists.
That doesn’t mean that we ignored it entirely of course. There’s an activity creating a timeline of Rome, asking kids to put different events into the right order (which also helps them to understand the B.C. & A.D. distinction). If nothing else, this helps give them some idea of how extensive the Roman Empire actually was.
If anything there’s an overfocus on classical cultures in kids’ education today. The Greeks, the Romans and the Ancient Egyptians get plenty of airtime, often with the result that their modern counterparts are ignored.
It’s an issue we also came up against in our Egypt workbook – we want to make sure that kids also know about modern Egypt and the people who live there now, not just Ramesses II.
So, our Italy workbook doesn’t have many Ancient Romans. Sorry!
2. Make clear that Italy only became a country recently
Although the city-state-empire of Rome was founded over 2,000 years ago, Italy as a modern nation was formed in 1946. The regions of Italy have huge cultural variation because many of them existed as their own country or city-state for hundreds of years.
Many regions have their own dialect (or language, depending on who you ask) like Umbrian, Venetian, Bolognese and Sicilian.
Italian itself is just one of those regional variants, promoted over the others. Originally the language of Florence, Tuscan Italian was used to write many famous Italian works of art, including the works of Dante, Petrarch and Machiavelli. In the 19th century it was chosen as the language of the Kingdom of Italy, probably because of the beauty of its metre (some have described Dante’s use of Terza Rima as sounding like waterfalls).
For that reason, we included an activity centred around different celebrations in Italy. Lots of towns and cities will have their own, unique celebrations, like the Festival of San Domenico, when a statue is draped in live snakes and paraded through the town, or the Partita a Scacchi, when one whole town gets involved in a giant game of chess, with people instead of pieces.
This activity involved quite a lot of research, but ended up being a lot of fun, and giving us a lot of ideas for places to visit in Italy. In many places small, local festivals have been absorbed or homogenized by a wider culture, so it’s lovely to have examples of preserved snippets of culture.
3. Talk about the history of food
Although this attitude is rapidly changing, many people see food as just fuel, rather than an opportunity to learn more about the culture and history of a different place, plus snacks. Italy has such a strong food culture, but we used this workbook as an opportunity to dig deeper into some of it.
We spent time researching the history of pasta – in fact, we made a little video about it.
Teaching kids about the history and stories of food is something we’re getting more and more into. We’ve been watching a brilliant kids programme called Waffles + Mochi, all about the different ways that food interacts with culture, but designed for kids. Although the language and acting is aimed at kids, the content is sophisticated and digs into complex cultural questions that have always fascinated, like “Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?”.
It’s well worth a watch if you and your kids are interested in food.
4. Female contributions to Italian history
Although the concept of highlighting women and their contributions to history may seem like an old concept, it still hasn’t really dug into kids’ culture and history teaching. Although there are objective reasons for the over-representation of white men in Eurocentric history, there are plenty of examples of female contributions to history.
Whenever we do a ‘Famous People’ related activity in one of our workbooks, we are determined to include as many women and people of colour as is feasible.
In this workbook we talk about famous Italian women, including:
Maria Montessori, the founder of the Montessori teaching method
Rita Levi-Montalcini, a doctor and medical researcher who won a Nobel Prize for her research on the nervous system
Renata Tebaldi, a famed Italian opera singer, seen by some as having the most beautiful voice of the 20th century
Here’s to plenty more!
5. Mussolini (but not too much)
We debated the role of Mussolini in our Italian workbook. Finally, we settled on mentioning him during our “Famous Italians” workbook (we said “famous”, not “brilliant”). It is a constant balance, working out how much space to give to fascist leaders involved with problematic parts of history.
On the one hand it’s essential to study how these people came to power, preserved their power and used it in terrible ways. On the other hand, giving them a lot of space means less room for other aspects of Italian history or culture. We don’t have a hard and fast rule about talking about these issues.
However, in the case of Mussolini, we decided not to. That’s partly due to wanting to give space to other things, but also linked to a problematic trend of seeing Mussolini as ‘not that bad’.
Many of the things that Mussolini did (personally changing the uniform of the Italian football team, riding around Rome with a lion in the car with him) can make him seem funny and somewhat harmless, particularly in comparison to Hitler or Stalin. Children can often focus on amusing details, instead of being aware of bigger, more abstract atrocities. We’re still conflicted about our choice and are open to re-addressing it at some point in the future (please get in touch if you have something to contribute to the debate – we’re always happy to talk!)