The Teacher of “Regalpetra”. School and Society in Sicily after the Second World War as told in Leonardo Sciascia’s chronicles and school memoirs

As a teacher in the primary school of Sicilian hinterland small village Racalmuto, a young Leonardo Sciascia manages to turn the tedious task of writing down “chronicles of school life” and “observations on the students” on the school register for a period of eight years (from 1949 to 1957) into the extraordinary experience to tell his own history as a teacher to a wider audience. First collected in a periodical called “Nuovi Argomenti” (1955) with the title of "Cronache scolastiche" and later reworked and published as successful novel "Le parrocchie di Regalpetra" published by Laterza in 1956, the school memoirs written by Sciascia, one of the most prominent Italian writers of the XXth century, represent research sources of the utmost importance for history of education historians. In fact, besides offering precious information on school and society in Southern Italy after the Second World War, the popular writer’s annotations later recollected in his memoirs stand, as a whole, for a fascinating “journey through memory lane”. At each stop of this journey, Sciascia pauses and looks back, “recalling” his experience as a teacher; furthermore, with the great expertise characterizing his narrative art, he tackles topics and issues that, rather than being connected only to a quite small and “quite Sicilian microcosm”, represent a report-exposure of high civil importance of the condition of Southern Italy during the second half of the XXth century. Firstly, by means of thoroughly examining Sciascia’s annotations on the school registers of Racalmuto as well as his works published at a later stage ("Cronache scolastiche" and "Le Parrocchie di Regalpetra"), the present contribution aims at proving the worth of autobiographical memoirs and literary works as a source of interest for both scholastic-historical and historical-educational research. Secondly, the paper aims at examining the bright professional journey through which the “teacher-writer” was able to heighten the small and dull “facts” concerning a Southern school to grave and important social issues, by relieving them from school directors and school inspectors’ judgment and thus presenting them to an increasingly wider audience.