In recent days the demolition of the Canaletto Middle School named after General Mario Fontana who was military commander in La Spezia during the Resistance has begun. When the road system was still in force which obligated pupils to attend school based on their residence, Fontana was the largest medium in the Municipality with a user base that ranged from Canaletto to Ruffino and Pitelli. In the spring of 1986 The nation decided to give an entire page to each middle school in La Spezia every week. On this occasion, Fontana reported the attendance of 523 students, a number which for our Municipality, which is struggling due to the demographic decline and the consequent contraction of users, was decidedly high.
For the basin that the Institute had to provide, it was impressive. Located between via del Canaletto and via Prosperi, the Fontana was born in a fairly unadorned area but in which a lot has been built since the seventies. Located below street level, the Institute was made up of three large blocks: two were classrooms and laboratories, the third was a large gym. Traditional educational activities were carried out in the appropriately equipped laboratories without forgetting those suggested by technological evolution. It was precisely in the 1985-86 school year that extended time began to work, which involved students for a greater number of hours than the traditional 30 hours. From the new course, two first classes were formed which at the end of 1985 visited the exhibition in Genoa at the Doria Museum Neanderthal Man in Liguria. Accompanying them I was also equipped with a camera and video recorder with which, helped by the boys, I recorded a lot of the exhibition. At school we enriched the film acquired with sounds, images and text so as to compile a VHS cassette with which we participated in a national competition organized by the Genoa Fair Authority.
To make a long story short: we won in the Schools category and in April I accompanied Simona and Mirko, representatives of their classmates, to collect the prize in Genoa: 1 million lire, not a small thing for the time, went to the School which used it for its activity. Perhaps we won because we were the only ones to participate but certainly our students had been introduced to film language.
The video recording laboratory continued to be enriched with instrumentation thanks to the trust given to the project by Gabriella Tartarini who was Fontana’s last Principal and first Director having taken over the following year from the previous Head of the Institute, Mrs. Spiller. It happened many years ago. Today it’s nice to pull that award out of the memory drawer.
