In July 2021 I received a long email from an elderly gentleman (a little older than me) that contained his high school story between 14 and 19 years of age. The email also contains the first elements of the author’s relationship with the boy who will become his partner for life. This email was published by me in Italian on the Progetto Gay forum. I also added my comment to the email in the Italian forum. A user (Lao) asked the author of the email to also tell what happened after the end of school, and the author of the first email sent a second one, also of considerable size as a response to Lao’s request. Since these are important documents that also have historical relevance because they allow us to understand how gay life was in the 60s of the last century, I have taken steps to translate the texts into English to insert them on the sites of Gay Project in English.To make the content exactly understandable to English-speaking readers, some preliminary clarification is needed.
1) In Italy, high school usually begins at 14 and ends at 19 with the Maturity exam.
2) There are many types of high school, the “Liceo Classico” represents the school traditionally attended by the social and economic elite of the country, today the prestige of the Liceo Classico tends to remain more than anything else a legacy of the past and the organization of this school address has been made much more homogeneous with that of the other addresses. In the 60s of the last century, the 5 years of the Liceo Classico were divided into a first two years (4th and 5th Ginnasio, a denomination inherited from still nineteenth-century regulations) and a final three-year period, the Liceo proper. In Italian schools of any order and grade, grades were and are assigned in tenths.
3) In the university faculties the marks were and are assigned out of thirty.Let us now turn to the texts.
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It was the year 1962 when, after finishing middle school, I was sent to high school in a prestigious religious institute not too much far from Milan. At the time I was 14, I had always lived in Milan and had attended the Middle School in Milan in another religious institute, of which today I only remember the large corridors with shiny floors, the teachers almost all priests and the very muffled climate, in to which nothing of the outside world penetrated.
We were visually controlled from time of entry to time of exit. My parents knew the parents of the other children, because the school occasionally organized meetings even between parents on the occasion of religious holidays. In the eighth grade I began to reflect on the fact that on those occasions they received communion in the school chapel, besides us boys, who had to do it by force, several mothers, but almost no fathers, as if religion were something for women and children, but then I didn’t ask myself too many questions about it.
At that time I knew nothing about sex, except that it is used to make babies. I was very naive and believed everything the teachers told me, who, as well as almost all priests, were also all old. Gymnastics was a marginal subject, which was done, because it had to be done by force, in the gym and only with individual exercises to be carried out strictly in tracksuits, obviously excluding any group sport. To avoid any possible risk that the presence in the gym could be pleasant, the gym was not heated and it was freezing cold. On the day in which gymnastics lessons were taken, boys went to school directly in tracksuit. It goes without saying that changing rooms and showers were absolutely unthinkable there.
My parents didn’t take much care of me, I was entrusted to the nanny who cooked for me different things from what the grown-ups ate. My mother bought my clothes according to her taste and I could only say yes lady. Even logistically I was part of a separate world, I had a room just before that of the nanny and this shows how they considered me. My parents went on vacation on their own with their friends and I went to the sea in a small town in Liguria with my nanny. I must say that I got along well with my nanny, apart from the fact that she was the only person I could talk to, she was a good woman and she loved me, she had no children and was a widow and cuddled me within the limits of social detachment which in any case divided us.
My parents, on the rare occasions when they talked to me, presented high school to me as something very serious and very difficult that I would have to face with the utmost seriousness because a failure (and then it happened) could definitively ruin my social role. The nanny, on the other hand, spoke to me of high school as a much freer place where there are guys who are starting to have their autonomy and to have their experiences, but at the time I didn’t even understand what it could be referring to. The last week of September the nanny takes me to the new school, I go with her to the station, we take the train and it takes more than two hours to get there, then the journey by taxi begins. I looked around bewildered, then the taxi stops and I find myself in front of a sumptuous building that was intimidating just to look at it. The nanny tries to cheer me up.
We go up the stately staircase and arrive at the offices, they make us wait about ten minutes, then a priest shows up. My nanny says my name, and then it’s all very informal. The priest dismisses the nanny and takes me to the tailor’s laboratory where the seamstress takes the measurements for my uniform, then takes me to a huge dormitory with a double row of beds and tells me that mine is number 18. He Shows me my closet to store my things and I notice that there is no key, then he tells me to put my things in the closet and gives me a printed booklet with the rules of the boarding school, he tells me that I can go to the recreation room “of the gymnasium” to read the rules and that at 13.00 I will have to go to the refectory for lunch. He recommends me to read the rules very carefully and he goes away.
The dormitory was totally empty, there were no other boys and no priests. I stowed my things in the closet and then went down to the recreation room which I found via a floor plan of the building annexed to the book of the rules. There was no one there either. I sat in a chair and started reading, but then I was unable to decode the meanings of those messages. There was a great deal of insistence on the fact that it was a Catholic school and that as such it required students to adhere to the principles of Catholicism, which I knew as a 14-year-old boy might know them. There was the hierarchy of the school, in which everything was in the hands of the professors and the principal, obviously all priests, and there was the hierarchy of the college, in which everything was in the hands of the educators, the spiritual father and the rector, of course they too are all priests, but the rector was superior to the principal because the rector was also responsible for the “spiritual formation” of the students. All these things then seemed obvious to me.
There was also a part that dealt with the punishments for poor scholastic commitment and unregulated moral conduct, which I then interpreted at the level of my 14 years. It was also said that each guy who had committed a fault would have to accuse himself in front of the superiors who would have assessed it on a case-by-case basis and, if a sanction had been applied, that would be noted in the behavioral notes that would be sent monthly to the family. The regulation was very detailed but at the same time very generic, everything, in practice, was left to the interpretation of the superiors.
Terrified by the idea of being late for lunch, at 12.45 I was in front of the “refectory of the Gymnasium”. There were two refectories, one for the Gymnasium and one for the Lyceum, to keep guys of different ages separate, and in that of the Gymnasium there was no one. The door was locked. At 12.55 a waitress opened the door and I entered. The hall was huge, I sat at the first table I saw but the waitress told me that that was the table of the superiors and then I went to put myself in the last place, but she told me that I had to put myself at number 18 (the same as my bed) and so I did, because in front of each seat there was a number. The atmosphere was very solemn. On the tables there was a white tablecloth, all the plates and cutlery were marked with the insignia of the institute and so did the napkin, which was numbered. Mine, obviously, was the number 18.
The waitress had stopped and was silent and I didn’t understand why. I looked at her puzzled and she said to me: “The prayer!”, Then seeing that I did not understand, she told me that before lunch the most important person present had to recite the prayer for everyone and since I was there alone I had to say it myself and had to add the intention. I didn’t know what to say and she suggested: “Sign of the cross”, then she put the words right in my mouth: “Lord, we thank you for this food, let it strengthen us on the path of faith and your service.” (this was the standard formula, for normal days), then she told me to add the intention and I said: “We pray for this school year that is about to begin”.
Then lunch was finally served. The cuisine was of a good standard, the work of professional chefs. An abundant well-seasoned first course, a second course of meat with vegetables and fruit. The waitress advised me that at 1.30pm I had to leave anyway because she had to close the refectory. At 1.30pm I didn’t know where to go. The institute was practically empty. I went back to the recreation room of the Gymnasium and began to read some magazines that were on the tables, obviously all Catholic and missionary magazines.
In the afternoon, around 3.30 pm another boy arrived. We introduced ourselves, he was as scared as me and I think even more than me. First of all we tried to understand how we should behave at dinner time then we talked about what we expected from the school. At 7pm we went to the refectory for dinner, I went to where I sat at lunchtime and my college mate sat next to me, but the waitress told him that he was number 26 and that his seat was at the other table, I recited the prayer and the intention and so we dined in two, sitting at two separate tables in a huge room where there was only us.
After dinner we went back to the recreation room because we didn’t know where to go. A priest passed there and told us that we must never stand without doing anything and that we could go to the chapel to pray and we obviously went there, frankly I didn’t understand what to do, but we obeyed as if everything was absolutely obvious . At 8.45 pm the chapel closed and we were sent to our dormitory, where our educator (a priest, of course) gave us a nightgown of the appropriate size, made by the tailor, obviously with the insignia of the institute and a metallic container with the essentials for a minimum of personal hygiene: soap, toothpaste and toothbrush. He told us that the next day we would have 10 minutes to shower, between 6.10 and 6.20, before going to the chapel for religious education. He told us that we had to be in bed at 9pm and that he would come by to check before turning off the light. At 21.00 we were in bed, the educator came by and turned off the light but I didn’t understand where, because there were no switches, then he said “holy night” not “goodnight” and left.
I was used to going to sleep at midnight and I didn’t like at all having to stay in bed from 9pm, but those were the rules. The next day at six o’clock a bell rang, which was the signal for getting up. We went into the bathroom, where there were 10 boxes with toilet and sink and 10 shower boxes. The boxes had a lockable door but the door did not reach the ground, I realized only after that the doors were made like this to check that in each box there was only one boy, but at the beginning I didn’t pay attention to these things.
At 6.30 we were in the chapel for religious education, in all there were eight boys, all from the Gymnasium, 14-15 years old. The benches in the chapel were numbered like the seats at the table. The chapel was not the large church of the institute, but a chapel used only by a group of classes, in my case the Gymnasium classes (about 80 boys) in which one of the educators said mass in turn. I learned that there was not an educator per class but that in the Gymnasium there were two educators who rotated on the two classes, so that they exchanged classes every month, at the time I did not understand the meaning of all this and I only understood several years later.
Mass begins, then, at the moment of the homily, religious instruction begins, centered on the idea of “fleeing bad company” in which, however, it was taken for granted what bad company was and it was insisted that “to love a mate” means “to worry about him” and for this reason when a mate “does not behave well” it is your specific moral duty to report it to superiors. In practice, it is a moral duty to be a spy.
Many of my new fellow students arrived that day. We were about forty in my class. They came in dribs and drabs. There was not even a chance to remember their names because they were too many. I looked around to see if there was any guy more beautiful than the others and it was thus that I saw Joseph G., a guy who seemed older than his age and who by now had very little childishness. I did not understand then why he had such a powerful and magnetic fascination with me, because I had never heard of homosexuality and I did not even know what masturbation was.
Joseph was the n. 32, his bed was very far from mine, in the mess hall he sat at another table, I could have talked to him only in the recreation room, but at the time I felt like an unborn child and compared to Joseph I felt a state of awe like in front of an adult. I continued to speak with n. 26, whom I had met the day before, with numbers 17 and 19, sitting next to me in the mess hall, I felt I had nothing in common and everything was limited to a quick and formal hello.
The following day’s religious instruction was on “fraternal correction” that is, in practice once again on the duty to spy. I saw Joseph only from a distance but the more I looked at him the more I liked him. The following day religious instruction was about two distinct things: “fleeing temptation” and “attending the sacraments”. We were told and repeated that a Christian boy communicates himself every day and has a spiritual father who can guide him in the search for holiness. Not attending the sacraments daily was viewed very badly as a kind of mark of Satan, a form of Luciferian rebellion. Many guys were starting to turn up their noses in front of these speeches which seemed right and obvious to me, quite simply because I had nothing special to confess.
When I went to confession, without a confessional, with one of the educators, I was insistently asked: “Don’t you have to accuse yourself of anything else?” and at my “no” the confessor was somehow perplexed. Like it or not, all the boys ended up accepting the imposition of confession. The first day of school began with a mass officiated by a bishop and the rector, whom I saw for the first time and from afar. We, for the first time, were dressed in the uniform of the institute and polished up to the incredible. Our places in the church were all assigned a priori. The bishop’s homily was very short, then the rector spoke but I was distracted because in the big church Joseph had happened right between me and the celebrant, a kind of “man of the screen”. Joseph was serious during mass and behaved like any other obedient collegiate.
After mass we went to the classrooms and the lessons began. Before each hour of class the professor would pray and invoke a saint and we had to answer: “Ora pro nobis”. We were loaded with homework from day one: both Latin (which we knew a little from middle school) and Greek, an absolute novelty. The first day we should have learned to read the pater noster in Greek, something that at the time seemed to me very important and monstrously difficult.
I didn’t know how the school day would be organized, I thought that everyone could study on their own but it wasn’t like that. At 1.30 pm lunch, then recreation until 2.30 pm and then again in the classrooms in the morning until 6.00 pm, when we went to the chapel for religious instruction. I could only see Joseph from afar and the possibility of exchanging a few words with him was reduced to half an hour of recreation between 14 and 14.30.
There were many guys in the classroom, most of us were dominated by the professors and educators who assisted us (in practice they also taught in the afternoon). Joseph was the only one who had a personality of his own, he was respectful and obedient, because it could not be done otherwise but sometimes he added some considerations that generally professors and educators did not like at all. They repeated to us that answering a question means keeping within the limits of the demand. Joseph was not only handsome, but he was also intelligent, I don’t mean studious but really intelligent, he was also 14 years old but he was extraordinarily smart.
From the first day of school we had been told that the best students would be given special awards, basically badges to pin on their jackets, such as military campaigns. The best student of each class in the trimestral scrutiny could wear a golden star, the second a silver star, those who had never been punished could wear a blue ribbon in their buttonhole. These things were highly coveted. I certainly could not think of being the first of the class and not even the second but I was proud of my blue ribbon. Joseph also had his blue ribbon because he had never been punished, but one day he took off the ribbon even though we, his class mates, knew very well that he had the right to wear it. Nobody, except us, noticed that the ribbon had been removed, if the educators had noticed it, they would have taken it as a gesture of rebellion, but no one noticed.
The time of the Christmas holidays came and I went home, I was very happy to see my nanny again, I can’t say the same for my father and my mother who were now like strangers to me. The return to school after the Christmas holidays was a very important moment for me. On the train from Milan I met Joseph who was traveling alone and was not even 15 years old, I was with my nanny, who however left me the compartment free so I could talk to Joseph. Joseph treated me like an adult and I felt comfortable and I can’t deny that I liked his very respectful way of treating my nanny right from the start. A contact with Joseph had been created and I would have done everything not to lose him.
At the end of the fourth year of the Gymnasium we were both promoted with marks just a little more than the minimum and this did not sadden me at all because I saw Joseph’s absolutely indifferent way of reacting. During the holidays between the fourth and fifth class of the Gymnasium I got to know Joseph more closely and I also went to his house and I realized that he was much freer than me, that he also had a bit of serious dialogue with his parents and then, also if I didn’t understand it then, I fell in love with him. We were always together, at least as far as possible, with the excuse of the holiday homework that still had to be done and were many.
On October 1st we were back in school, but I now had a special friend. Religious education took a particular turn and practically became an indoctrination on family and marriage according to the Catholic Church. We spoke very often of Our Lady as a mother and as a model of woman, and I did not understand why we should insist so much on these things. The virginity of the most pure Mater had to be taken as an example, for me all these speeches made no sense, but for my mates they were not at all indifferent. I did not understand the emphasis that the priests put on the subject of girls but then slowly I realized the embarrassment with which many guys approached that subject, which to me was neither hot nor cold and I noticed that Joseph laughed at it making fun of the other mates, he didn’t react like the other guys. But for me Joseph was an absolutely platonic love and so he remained until the end of the Gymnasium.
We passed the Gymnasium license exams for the broken cap but we passed them and then we spent the summer together. My parents had known Joseph and trusted him, and that was how I went on vacation with Joseph’s family. I liked his parents but spending the whole summer with Joseph was like being in heaven for me. We went to the Island of Elba to a house belonging to Joseph’s family. The house was small and I was in the room with Joseph. One evening his parents stayed at a friend’s house and I was left alone with Joseph. It was the first time I saw a tremendous embarrassment on Joseph’s face, similar to what our companions had when they talked about girls. He wasn’t the bad company for me but I was the bad company for him.
I didn’t know how to behave but I followed my instinct, took his hand and squeezed it. He didn’t know what to do and I said to him: “What are you afraid of? We are not doing anything wrong.” It started like this, we had both just turned 16. Afterwards, Joseph was terrified and it was my turn to make him understand that he hadn’t done anything wrong, however he was really upset and kept away from me as if he had done something terrible against me and so I caressed his face and ran a hand through his hair and he flashed me a beautiful smile. The next day he asked me if I was upset but I told him that I was very happy and that I loved him.
When the time to go back to school approached, he asked me how we would go about confession and we concluded that we would have to feign ideological reasons (loss of faith) if we wanted to avoid desecrating the sacraments and we agreed that we would do so, and then we could have talked about girls and it would have been almost normal.
October 1st of the following year, now sixteen, Joseph and I entered the Lyceum. We expected that something could change, but absolutely nothing changed, now in the refectory (the Lyceum refectory) there were almost 120 guys and the large refectory (the one of the Lyceum) looked almost like a cathedral. Occasionally the rector and the spiritual father were also seen for lunch. The order was of a military type, we did not sit at the table before the prayer which, even in the Lyceum, was accompanied every day by different intentions. The rector welcomed us and prayed for our commitment to studies and Christian life.
During the masses in the chapel with the other high school students I noticed that not everyone received communion and this made me think why, because neither I nor Joseph did, but the others let themselves be convinced by the educators and the next time they went to confession and communicated, I and Joseph, on the other hand, did not allow ourselves to be convinced. It was obvious from the very first days that our way of doing things had been noticed and was not welcome at all. I was called by the spiritual father, whom I had only seen in the dining room, and I suspected that the reason was precisely the fact that I did not approach the sacraments.
He was a relatively young priest, between 40 and 45 years old, he had the manner of a career priest who aimed to become rector in the time of a few years. I had asked the older mates if they had ever talked to the spiritual father and they told me that they didn’t really know him but that he only dealt with the “big problems”. I went to the interview expecting what would happen. The spiritual father told me that he often spoke to the boys who asked him for advice: first lie! Then he started taking things very far, he asked me how I was with the professors, but on this point the answer was obvious, then he asked me about my classmates, if there was anyone with whom I was better off and I named a couple of those who seemed born to be an altar boy for life and obviously I didn’t even mention Joseph, then the inquisitorial examination began: “How is your Christian life?” and I told him that I wanted so much to have a Christian life but that I had lost my faith and I was beginning to feel distant from those things. He put on his stole, assuming that I wanted to confess but I replied that the idea of approaching the sacraments in a non-spontaneous way would have seemed to me a lack of respect for those who truly believe. The spiritual father was very perplexed and dismissed me, adding that he would pray for me.
By now I knew I was a special supervised, and I couldn’t stand that condition, if it had been for me, I would have left immediately, at the cost of facing my parents in a bad way, because they would have taken it very badly, and I would have gone to a public high school which I thought would be a completely different world, but I could not abandon Joseph. We could have both been expelled, but it was impossible to understand the consequences. We had to go on with an absurd play to escape what we felt was a form of total violence. There would be another three years of actual torture but we were ready to face them.
No contact with Joseph was possible, not even the slightest one, exchanging notes would have exposed us to dangerous situations. I learned later that Joseph had used a different strategy from mine and this had misled the investigations of the spiritual father. He had stolen the drawing of a naked woman made by another guy and had deliberately hidden it between the pages of his own Latin vocabulary, the sheet was irregular and was leaning against the binding in only two places, but he, then, had found that same sheet put in a different way, a sign that someone had browsed through his dictionary and, having found the sheet, had not taken it but had left it there. Since the lockers for school books and notebooks were in the classroom where lessons were taught, the likelihood that the nosy individual was a schoolmate was practically nil. I had noticed that the spiritual father, when he met Joseph, said to him: “Say three Hail Mary to Our Lady …” I learned only lather that Joseph had ended up giving in to the pressure of the spiritual father, who imagined him as Adam tempted by Eve, and had told the priest exactly what he expected.
Eventually Joseph was forced to make fun of the sacraments and suffered a lot because of this. I tried to tell him many times that only “free” decisions that harm others are true faults, but he was not secular enough to accept this point of view.
The real moments of contact with Joseph were in the holidays. During the Christmas and Easter holidays we could go out together and they were exciting and overwhelming days, sometimes we got to touch each other or masturbate together. At that time there was no AIDS and for two boys of our age, venereal diseases were a completely unknown and unthinkable reality.
Neither my parents nor Joseph’s have ever suspected anything, evidently the Catholic school had been a good training ground, had given us a good education and had taught us how to “protect ourselves from the dangers that surrounded us”.In the summer holidays between first and second year of the Lyceum, all our doubts were dispelled, we were 17, but we knew what we wanted, by now we were thinking with our heads. Joseph got along well with his parents but he didn’t even dream of talking openly with them about sexuality, I practically had only a formal relationship with my parents, they were fine with it and I understood day after day that only with Joseph I could live my life and that reconciling what I felt for Joseph with other things would have been impossible.
Both he and I had been very lucky because, without internet and without mobile phones and with the fear of coming out that there was at that time, the probability of finding another serious gay guy was almost zero.The last year, by now, we were no longer afraid of anything or anyone. We had to study because at that time the baccalaureate exam was terrible but we also had fun, after Christmas holidays we introduced Boccaccio’s short stories in full edition “to deepen our studies!” And the book was confiscated from us but we didn’t get a disciplinary report so as not to raise dust. But the most beautiful thing was when we put two copies of Marx’s Capital in the locker of our two mates “who were always spying”. There it was really seen that from one day to the next the hunt for the rotten apple began, or it would be better to say the witch hunt, but the priests did not come to understand who had introduced those books and the matter was covered up.
Taken with difficulty (very laboriously) the baccalaureate we had to face the problem of the choice of the faculty, a choice that our parents considered fundamental, while for us the only fundamental choice was to stay together. My father would have wanted me to be a doctor, Joseph’s father would have wanted him to be a lawyer, like him, in the end we both decided to study engineering and it was a free and very timely choice. Now we are both old, over 70, health is a bit uncertain but still holds up passably. We have a well-established engineering company where no one knows about us. We were both only children.
Our parents have always been in the dark about everything. We live in two single houses in an area not really central of the city, we have opened a door in the fence that divides us, obviously we have been living together for a many years, basically since we were both parentless 14 years ago.We have in common a caregiver (a lady doing everything), a bit of a kind of nanny for old people. I think she understood how things are but she’s very prudent and not at all nosy and we never got into trouble. We have a dog, “pof”, which is basically our dog and mate, not just his or mine.
Now we are free, 60 years ago we would never have imagined such a future. I am grateful to the Catholic school because, paradoxical as it may seem, it has led us to think using our brains only. Believe me, Project, in our time and in our conditions it was very difficult. If you think it appropriate you can put this mail in the forum.
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Thanks for your email, we are more or less the same age, but I attended a state high school, that was also a closed environment but there was a very different air and there were no institutionalized attempts at ideological education, even in my school there was an insinuating penetration of Catholic organizations, but the fact that the school was not part of a boarding school but was a state school where one only stays for morning class hours, still allowed forms of relative pluralism. One could also get caught up in a state school in brainwashing organizations like the ones you talk about, but he also had the option of getting out of them if he wanted to, and then a consideration must be added, the boarding school you speak of had two characteristics, one was being Catholic and the other was being an elite social environment, therefore very selective, and it’s a terrible match.
Your story reminded me, for certain atmospheres, of Roger Peyrefitte’s novel “Les amitiés particulières”, but Peyrefitte’s novel was published in 1943 and refers to times well before the 1960s, the epilogues of Peyrefitte’s book are tragic because the pervasiveness and violence of what it portrays were objectively extreme. The story you tell is from the 60s and the climate had already changed. I must add that reading your e-mail I was afraid of finding a conclusion similar to that of Peyrefitte’s novel but luckily it was not so. After the end of the war the world has objectively changed, at least in Europe, and the happy ending of your story is a clear sign of it. Thanks again for your contribution. I add another consideration: it is truly terrible to see how the Gospel can be exploited and the history of the church shows infinite examples of it, some far more terrible than those you refer to.
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Dear Project, first of all, thank you for your reply.I respond to Lao’s remark, who asks me for a more detailed report of my story after 1967.
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I graduated in 1967, before the Sullo reform, to let you understand the one that introduced the exam with only two written and two oral tests, then I took the exams as they were foreseen by the Gentile reform, with all the written tests, with the oral about all subjects and with the repair session (in September) for those who had not obtained the pass in all subjects in the first session, the exam at the time was truly a nightmare. At the time, about 30% of the students failed the high school graduation. In this sense, having attended high school in a border school like the one where I studied was not a small guarantee, because it was a school that was respected and feared by the examination boards themselves.
Both Joseph and I seriously took the risk, if not of being rejected, at least of being postponed to September session, what then happened to about 50% of the students and we got away with it, I think, essentially because the commissioner of Italian, who was certainly not of Catholic inspiration, questioned Joseph about the 11th canto of Paradise, that of St. Francis , and questioned me even about Carducci. Joseph understood that the professor of the commission was open-minded and talked about Boniface VIII, ecclesiastical corruption and the repression of pauperism movements, all problems that we had studied on our own in the Treccani encyclopedia, which was free to consult in the library of the school because it was believed that no one would read it. I, on the other hand, let myself be carried away by enthusiasm by speaking of the hymn to Satan, while the internal commissioner, father [omitted] looked at me with eyes of fire as if I were the incarnate devil.
The commissioner of Italian told me that he appreciated my essay on Carlo Cattaneo. I went to find Cattaneo’s passage that I commented on in my graduation paper, I am copying here a part of it, which is what excited me: “Today we want science in literature, not in the didactic sense but in the sense of vast, profound erudition, in the sense of the solidarity of nations, in the humanitarian sense, in the sense of freedom.” I, who was used to reading only Manzoni, found myself perfectly at easy in a vision of the world that was much more mine, that word “freedom” exalted me. Joseph also did his essay on Cattaneo but devoted himself to commenting on another passage by Cattaneo: “Literature, which in our days has given itself entirely to the service of civilization, can no longer be, as in ancient times, cultivated in isolation; we laugh now at hermit scholars, we shrug our shoulders disdainfully on their selfish meditations from which transpires such profound ignorance of the world and things, so limited erudition, often limited to the circuit of their own city or at most of their own nation, and which shows to be inspired by idols long overthrown, by rhetorical or purely classical scholastic traditions.”
What Cattaneo said was precisely the demolition of the culture that had been proposed to us, but I should say imposed, as a model. Joseph and I were the only two candidates to carry out the essay on Cattaneo and I think it was precisely this that saved us from being postponed to September session if not precisely from rejection. To the enormous scorn of our internal commissioner, father [omitted], we both took 8/10 in the written and 8/10 in the oral of Italian and we also earned the esteem of the external commissioner of Mathematics. The experience of the exams gave me for the first time the precise feeling of how much I had lost not attending a public high school. In the other subjects we took just 6/10, the minimum, because we knew little or nothing about science subjects and the commissioners of Latin and Greek and of History and Philosophy were fascinated by the tradition and the name of my school. When the commission left, the commissioner of Italian shook our hand and did it just with the two of us.
After the exams, we still had the enormous problem of making our parents digest that we would have made our choices about the university faculty exclusively on the basis of our criteria. My father took it for granted that I would follow his “advice” slavishly, Joseph’s parents would have left him greater freedom of choice, but in any case with regard to a very limited range of choices and in any case they would have assumed that Joseph attended university in Milan, but we had other projects in mind, we wanted to leave Milan as soon as possible to have our real autonomy and we had already made our choices, we wanted to enroll in Engineering and in Rome, not in Milan, but getting our parents to accept such a project and, moreover, diverting their attention from the fact that a similar choice, made by two guys, could hide reasons that had nothing to do with studies, was an undertaking worthy of Agamemnon.
We had to find a way to get there and we had to find it soon. Our parents began to offer us well-selected female companies, that is, of the appropriate social and economic level. Coming from an all-male boarding school it was assumed that we did not have female friends but it was also taken for granted that we were eager to have it, which was a thousand miles away from reality. Joseph’s family had identified a “suitable” girl for him and this idea was beginning to put Joseph in a bad mood, but the girl, who had also completed her high school path, wanted to enroll at the National dance academy in Rome, this fact on the one hand facilitated Joseph’s situation in Milan and on the other hand could have interfered with our plans to go to Rome, but there was the fact that the hypothetical relationship between that girl and Joseph was only in the fantasies of Joseph’s parents, because in all probability the girl had completely different projects in mind.
Since time was short, we first decided to act separately, to avoid our parents think of a premeditated project built in two. We would have started by shooting very high, that is, by proposing something that was not acceptable to our parents from any point of view. One evening while my parents were watching television I told them what plans I had for the future: I wanted to work to be financially independent and I had already sent 10 job applications to Rome. I had made copies to show my parents, but obviously I hadn’t sent the application forms.
My parents were stunned and asked me why such a decision, but I said that at the university there were also evening courses for student-workers, which was not true then, even if my parents didn’t know it, but became true a few years later, and I said I would work and study. In reality it was more complicated than it may seem today, because then you came of age at 21 and I would still have been dependent on my parents for another three years, even if I had worked. They asked me what faculty I wanted to attend and I said I wanted to do engineering, obviously they tried to advise me against in every way but I was decided in my choices. Some of their friends’ children had done engineering and it didn’t seem so scandalous to them, but that I had to work “like a starving man” they just didn’t accept it. It was the first time I saw my parents worried, not about me, but about the social disgrace that could result from having a child who works like “a starving man.” By now the die was cast!
After a couple of days of indecision I said that they had called me to work in Rome as an evening conductor in a cinema. My father looked at me in disgust, as if I had gone out of my mind and they had called me to be the keeper of a brothel, but he said nothing, I was terrified that my parents would decide not to intervene. I compared a train ticket to Rome and put it on the bedside table, the next day my mother came to try to make me come to my senses, but I started to pack my suitcase hoping that their resistance would yield.
In the evening my father came to Canossa and asked me to pay me a house near the university because otherwise, as a worker-student I would never have graduated. I accepted and said that I had to go to Rome anyway to immediately communicate to those in the cinema that I would not go and that they had to look for someone else and furthermore I also had to look for a small apartment.
The next morning at 5.30 I leave the house and go to the station with a briefcase. I agree with my parents that I will be away from home for three full days and will sleep in a hotel for two nights. Joseph goes up to Rogoredo and we make the whole trip together. He did not need to resort to tricks of any kind with his parents. His father told him that he had to do what he believed best and that they would support him financially anyway. At the time, as far as I knew, my parents and Joseph’s did not know each other at all, my parents knew Joseph but not his parents, so we could have taken two very close apartments, but the thing had to be evaluated concretely in Rome. It was a long and tiring journey but it was “our journey”, finally we were free!
The train was very crowded but we were sailing towards our freedom. We arrive in Rome Termini in the afternoon and it is terribly hot, just to die. We immediately go to the hotel and we take “two single rooms”, in order to have two single receipts, we deposit the luggage and we rest for a while, then we look for the way to go to the university area, but it is close to the station and you can go there very well on foot. We go for a ride and buy a Rome newspaper with classified ads. Today in the newspapers these things are no longer there, because they are all on the internet, but then there were whole pages of advertisements of all kinds and obviously also of houses for rent.
We spend the evening selecting ads with the map of Rome at hand and we find two that could be fine. The next morning we go to the university to take the Rule of studies from the engineering faculty, we go to see where the lessons are held and then we go to see the two apartments, the first is unpresentable and the landlord does not convince us at all, he wants to do everything “aumma aumma”, that is, without a contract in order to elude taxation, etc. etc.. The second would be a possible solution, it costs more but has two rooms and it seems a serious thing, it could very well be taken jointly by both of us, it would be fine for us but we do not know how to make our parents accept such a thing because it would be suspicious and would sound strange. We leave it pending, we spend the afternoon looking for other newspapers with rental advertisements, in the afternoon we see three more.
We find a solution that seems possible to us: two very small apartments quite close to each other and that both had a telephone, which is fundamental, because at the time it was not at all obvious that there was a telephone in a student apartment. The apartments, however, were a little further away from where the lessons were held than the ones we had seen the day before. On the morning of the third day we go to see and the solution seems acceptable all in all. We pay an advance to secure the apartments, or rather, two separate advances, and we have the receipts made. The hosts seem used to renting apartments to students.
We take the train back to Milan. Joseph gets off at Rogoredo, and changes trains so as not to arrive with mine, this could have been done without but it seemed necessary to use the utmost caution. At home I explained to my parents what I had done and strangely they didn’t make too many fuss, because the very fact of paying for the apartment seemed to them a form of participation more than enough in my life. Classes started on November 5th.
We entered the house on November 1st. In the very early days I had some problems with the landlord who had often seen Joseph leave my house and was afraid that Joseph was in fact a sub-tenant, when he saw that Joseph had officially taken up residence in another house, also in Rome, and that I paid the rent regularly, the landlord didn’t make a fuss anymore and in fact Joseph came to live in my house, which was a little closer to the university. The very first days of November we got the necessary books for the exams and we began to leaf through them and there the first unexpected trauma arrived. We read but we understood almost nothing. We realized that our level of knowledge of scientific disciplines was almost nil and, I must admit, we panicked. In the meantime, the lessons had begun and after few days had begun to be incomprehensible.
In class there was a lot of people and many behaved like morons, said nonsense to make others laugh, threw the cartoccetti (small bullets made from pieces of paper folded several times) with the rubber band, while the professors continued unperturbed to write slates of formulas gradually more and more incomprehensible. We went to class every day but lost ground every day. We realized that if we hadn’t studied overnight we wouldn’t have carved a spider out of a hole. We had reduced the time we had to take away from studying to a minimum, we went to class all morning, ate a sandwich and immediately went back to studying and exercising. We arrived late in the evening with tears of despair.
We did not return to Milan during the Christmas holidays and stayed in Rome to study desperately and it was precisely then that we began to recover some of the lost ground. When we began to understand something about the Geometry of the straight line and the plane in space, my brain opened up, I began to understand the general logic of analytic Geometry. Analysis was treated in a very abstract and theoretical way, but passing from the limits to the derivatives we began to understand something even at an intuitive level. Physics and Chemistry seemed more understandable in theory but it still seemed very difficult to solve problems.
A separate and almost insurmountable problem was the so-called Civil design. Our colleagues who came from other types of studies did wonderful things without any effort, we struggled with even the most elementary things and our drawings were absolute filth. Axonometry and perspective at the beginning were for me beyond the limits of what is possible. I felt really incapable.
After Christmas the classrooms were empty, there were a quarter of the students compared to the first days of November. Who had happened there by mistake understood that it was not air for him and changed faculty. We went to hear an exam session and we were terrified, very few passed and many repeated the exam more than once.
In February we seemed to begin to understand and follow the subjects, but the exams were almost all on subjects that we did not know at all and that we had not yet dealt with: from quadrics to Thermodynamics, from Stereochemistry to Combinatorics. We were really in crisis, we studied like crazy but saw no light at the end of the tunnel.
At the beginning of March we were finally able to follow the lessons very roughly or better only intuitively, studying like crazy until late at night. The exercises started to came more or less to the right solution and we began to understand the beauty of science subjects in which something is either right or wrong and the procedures have indisputable rational motivations. We didn’t even go back to Milan for Easter, we just thought about studying.
At that time, sex between us was just the medicine of despair and basically the least of our thoughts, also because we were still together 24 hours a day and shared practically all aspects of life. The relationship with the other students was reduced to a minimum because in practice it was an “Every man for himself!” The professors were mythical characters you saw from afar except for the heart attack moment of exams.
Virtually all the exams had written and oral and the vast majority of the skimming was done in writing tests. You could bring the books you wanted to the writing test, and the slide rule, a thing that today is a museum object but then was practically the only possible means of calculation, because portable electronic calculators did not exist at all and in any case the slide rule was the only concrete alternative to the tables of logarithms. Today there are programmable calculators and there are monstrous ones, then there was none of this and a very big part of the difficulties of Physics or Chemistry problems was represented by numerical calculation. Someone carried with them the tables of logarithms with seven decimal places to make more precise calculations, but in reality in that way the risk of calculation errors increased dramatically.
Professors corrected exercises in two phases: first they looked at the numerical result, if that was correct, at least approximately, they looked at the procedure and a calculation error led to calculate the score of that exercise as zero. Getting the calculations wrong was deadly. We had gone to look for and put together the texts of the written tests of Analysis, Physics and Chemistry and we had taken notes of the recurring questions in the oral also of Geometry. The courses ended in early June and in June we had no real chance of passing any of the scheduled exams.
We did not return to Milan even in the summer because we had to pass the exams, or at least three exams by September, otherwise our whole project would have failed miserably and we would have had to go home to face general commiseration. We went to follow all the exams of the summer session, of all the subjects we should have done. We took notes, then we went home and studied the topics trying to understand what the professors wanted and there I realized that I understood absolutely nothing of many topics that I thought I knew. Quadrics and Thermodynamics remained a real mystery, I had learned many definitions to parrot but their meaning escaped me.
Following the exams, however, we began to understand the meaning of state functions and quasi-static processes and when we understood the physical-mathematical meaning of the Carnot cycle, a world opened up to us. We decided to focus everything on three exams: Geometry, Analysis and Physics and to leave for November or even February, if necessary, Chemistry and Civil design.
At the beginning of July we became able to do the exercises and to find the right results in most cases, and we had learned to use the slide rule speedy and safely, in mid-July we had finished the first review of the theoretical subjects and we began to deal with the written exams. We used to do the tests together, in the set time of two hours, as if we were at the exam, then we corrected each other by looking at the solutions published after the written tests and we assigned each other a score with the criteria adopted by the professors.
I remember that at the first tutorial on a real Geometry test, I took 11/30 and Juseph 12/30, it seemed a very poor result, but only two months before we would have been at zero. Things were a little better with Analysis (22/30 and 21/30) and Physics (19/30 and 18/30) because the books and exercise collections we used were much better done. At the end of July we had brought the Geometry results to around 20 and those of Physics and Analysis to around 23. In the following 40 days, which preceded the exams, we proceeded studying non-stop from morning to night right out of necessity avoiding even the least waste of time. We arrived on the eve of the exams with average results always above 20, which may seem little but it already means knowing the subjects passably.
We decided to try, if we had taken less than 24 we would have rejected the assigned grade and we would have presented ourselves to the next session. The day of the Analysis exam came, the anxiety was very strong, we entered. The candidates were distributed in a huge classroom. The texts of the tests were different (A, B, C, D) and were assigned by drawing lots, Joseph and I had different tests. At the end of the two hours we went out with some unsolved doubts and with the bad copies of the tests, we went home and we corrected each other the tests following the procedure step by step, I expected to have taken 22 and he expected 21, we had both made mistakes of trivial algebraic calculation despite the right procedure. We looked at each other disconsolately.
Two days later the results of the test came out, only eight guys had been admitted to the oral tests, only one with 30, two with 27, Joseph had obtained 24 and I an unexpected 26, the others were all under 20, it didn’t seem true to me. We had a week before the oral. We began questioning each other day and night, obsessively repeating proofs and theorems. We both passed the exam with 27 and there was only one guy who came out with 30. The happiness was total. That evening we allowed ourselves to make love, but from the next day the obsession with Geometry began again which however lasted only a week. We both got 23 at the written test, a score that should have led us not to present ourselves at the oral, but since the highest mark in the written test was 26 we thought we would present all the same and we both came out with 25, a result that did not seem like a great thing, but anyhow we had passed the examination.
Physics that also had a written test “with numerical calculation” that terrified us was still pending, the exam was scheduled for mid-October and there was a minimum of time. We decided to focus on the most difficult topics: Thermodynamics and waves. Our levels in written problems had risen to around 26 and this encouraged us. We went to the written test and we both went out with a 22, but our 22 came after a single 25 and a single 23, we decided to play it all out and go to the oral exam. They asked me “conservation of angular momentum and law of areas”, “second principle of thermodynamics” and “interference”. Joseph was required to solve some written exercises also in the oral. We both came out with 26, we were disappointed but we accepted the grade.
In practice we started from scratch and we ended up with an average of 26, which could seem little only if seen from the outside, for us it was an achievement, it was the certification that we could go on. We had more time to prepare for the Chemistry exam, Joseph came out with 27 and I with 28 and I felt like I was touching the sky with a finger.
We were left with the nightmare of Civil design, an exam that generally served others to raise the average grade, but for me it was exactly the opposite, there the test was basically just graphic and the oral was a discussion of the written. Joseph passed with 25, I had really made a table that was rubbish. The professor calls me and gestures to make me understand that the proof was indecent, and he writes a 23 on a piece of paper, but he does not write it on the booklet, that is, he does not write it as final grade, I start answering in bursts explaining all the errors I had done, after a few minutes he turns the sheet over and writes 24 and underlines it twice to which I nod yes. When I got out it didn’t even seem real to me.
On November 5th, when lessons resumed, we had passed all the scheduled exams and were able to devote ourselves to the subjects of the second year. I liked the Rational Mechanics exam very much, much less Analysis two with multiple integrals, moments of inertia and differential equations, while I was fascinated by electromagnetism, but now things were progressing regularly, the average of the marks was going up.
The final three-year period was already more specialized but up to a certain point. I was fascinated by Construction science, much less by Applied mechanics. Electrical engineering seemed to me a real discovery, so much so that I regretted having chosen civil engineering. With our colleagues in the three-year period, the climate was different, we were numerically few compared to the two-year period, there was some collaboration and they also tried to insert us in the group but we always kept ourselves out of groups of any kind.
The turning point of our course of study has been Numerical analysis exam “with programming elements” which at the time was considered only a further exam in mathematics because computer science was really reduced to a minimum. A new world opened up in front of us, we understood that Electronic calculation had nothing to do with the calculations made with the slide rule and that the rules of the game were changing. We talked to the professor who took us seriously, he gave us programs to develop in Fortan and Algol, then Pascal was not yet there and the thing had for us the charm of discovery.
Our calculation programs were evolved and the professor liked us and allowed us to access the calculation laboratory, something then practically impossible for a student. We were automatically pushed to a much higher level ofmathematical study of Numerical analysis. Numerical analysis was the first exam in which we got honors, which sent us into orbit. We maintained contact with the professor of Numerical analysis and when Pascal came out in 1970 we began to work on structural calculation programs, these are things that compared to what today’s PCs do are of a disarming elementary, but at the time they were shocking news, above all because they avoided the problem of calculation errors.
We graduated with honors in November 1972 with two coordinated theses on: “Programs for calculating complex linearizable reticular structures”. Unfortunately, due to the postponements of the graduation session we were unable to take the State qualification exam in the second session of 1972 but in June 1973, at the age of 25,we had taken the qualification and were finally engineers. I must point out that our families knew nothing of our true story, they did not know that we had lived together for years and that we had graduated on the same day practically covering the same subjects.
Now our parents expected us to return to Milan to find some prestigious work place, perhaps through some of their friends, but we had quite precise ideas, we wanted to open an “advanced” civil engineering studio based on the use of computers. Today this seems an absolute obvious, but 50 years ago it was not at all. To do something minimally dignified we needed money, at least to get an apartment to use as the office of the studio and to be able to hire a couple of collaborators, essentially a very up-to-date computer scientist and an administrative secretary capable of handling tax matters. As far as the problems of patents were concerned, we would have tried to do it ourselves or at most to have recourse (as little as possible) to external consultants, but to start we needed a considerable amount of money.
We did not let ourselves be led into the world of dreams and we established a principle: “never take a step longest than the leg!” Our parents had offered to help us financially but they would have liked us to return to Milan, what we absolutely did not want to do, so we made a choice that was harshly criticized: we applied for substitute teaching to teach in technical high schools, and at that time it was very easy to have the substituting because there were few technical graduates.
We taught for three years in technical high schools and we put aside everything we could, however we were not even able to pay an advance to buy an apartment for the study and so we decided to rent one and try to become entrepreneurs of ourselves. We took a three-room apartment in the middle of the suburbs but rather well placed and we decided to do a crazy shopping for us at the time, we bought an Olivetti P6060 computer which costed a huge amount of money, over 8,000 dollars, at the exchange rate of that time almost five million and a half lire, as teachers we earned less than 250,000 lire a month, which means that the computer costed, including taxes, about 25 months’ salary.
The computer was an office computer, but it was very heavy (over 40 kg) and a real mammoth, which, however, gave our office an absolutely unique and super-technological aspect. As soon as the P6060 was activated we started to work on it and in the time of a month we developed the first software, the one for the office accounting, which was all stored on large 20×20 soft-disks, then we started working on the projecting of steel reticular structures and we had the possibility to make monstrously complex calculations (for that time) and without risk of errors, in practice we could print and deliver in one day the project of a complex structure that required at least 15 days for others and certainly our calculations were more precise.
Unfortunately, there was no way to draw with a computer as is done now with CAD and therefore we still needed a mechanical designer able to execute the tables quickly and well. We turned to one of our best students (Martin) who came to work for us, we gave him a state-of-the-art drafting machine, an instrument that is now a museum object. The work began to arrive, we did not worry about following the real work in progress, we had only to project and calculate structures and we dedicated all our free time to software projecting. In a few years we were able to buy a bigger apartment for the studio, as well as Martin we also hired his girlfriend, who was called Martina (a combination more unique than rare).
Then we expanded further and hired one of the first professionally trained specialists in computer science, especially to choose computers that were at the forefront because in those years the evolution was very rapid. After a few years we stopped using self-produced software and began to master specialized commercial software and we have continued on this path until now. Over the years we have bought two houses for ourselves, in each of the houses there is a single room and a double room, as if they were houses intended to host traditional families. We never invited strangers to our house, those very rare times that our parents came to Rome, the double room, in theory that of the guests, was for them.
Today our parents are no longer there and we have no siblings, we have to think only of ourselves and of old age that is advancing big steps, but as long as health assists us we are fine!Please Project, if you deem it appropriate, add this email to our previous one. Thank you!
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