Tre "Maestri". Mario Lodi

Mario Lodi was born and grew up with Fascism, in an area of Italy, the Lower Eastern Po Valley, where two opposing forces for a long time, the Nation and Agrarian Socialism, faced each other since the beginning of the century, before and after the Mussolini regime. These two circumstances made a profound mark in the life of one the most famous teachers of republican and democratic Italy: in the search, first of all, of a school for the people, which would definitively solve the problem of the historical exclusion of the lower classes from education and in the longing, on the other hand, for a rural marginality that was capable of preserving the values that the impetuous transformation of the country, after the war and after the defeat of the laborers' movement in the southern countryside and in the Po Painura, had set in motion. Exponent of the Cooperative Education Movement, after 1968, Lodi became, thanks above all to the mediation of the Communist Party, through Bruno Ciari, Gianni Rodari and Daniele Ponchiroli of the Einaudi publishing house, the democratic teacher par excellence, a sort of lay equivalent of Don Lorenzo Milani , and as such it entered the memory of the Italian school of the second half of the twentieth century.