For whom the land tolls

February 29th, 1884. Beyond the southern bank of the river Po, facing the cold, northern Alps, an empty space lies untrodden, covered in snow. Giovanni Angelo Reycend, an important local engineer, has been appointed to come up with a project for a college where the daughters of military soldiers throughout the whole of Italy may have access, as future mothers, to a better education. His ideas are widely appreciated and eloquently made, as many will believe later on in time, but they are concrete and soon applied: before the end of 1888, the empty space is covered up by a long-deemed, immense building, delightfully contoured by red-brick walls.

The college dedicated to the daughters of the military soldiers had a relatively short life and the sudden changes that took place in the following century put an end to it: in 1940, facing the needs of the 2nd World War, it was converted into a military hospital and only three years later it was confiscated by the German troops. In 1945, the partisans of the national liberation movement occupied it and soon thereafter it became a

middle school.

With the coming of the new millennium, in 2000, our highschool came into existence within the walls of this controversial building. Born as an appendix of the prior school “Giordano Bruno”, its administration was assigned to Maria Luisa Vighi Miletto, our current Headmistress, and its status immediately became independent. Along with the elementary and middle-school sections, which had been created in 1995-1996, in 2001 a whole new public body came to life under the name of “Istituto Altiero Spinelli”, with the objective of responding to the increasing need of an international culture at a European level.

The first years are always referred to as the sweetest ones. The school's spaces were limited to half of the corridor on the 3rd floor and the only existing classroom, with its walls delightfully painted pink, was the current computer room. The teachers, in turn, who officially belonged to “Giordano Bruno”, were all squashed together, as their room was the same one where the headmistress and the

secretaries worked.

Despite being idyllic times, in which everyone felt part of an extended family, rivalry with the other two schools in the building arose from the beginning. The Headmistress describes those days with her hands well sunken into her hair: “We didn't even have the keys to the entrance door from Via Figlie dei Militari, which meant that we couldn't even use the elevator, nor would anyone have allowed us to, because we were unwanted guests”. The 3rd floor's corridor itself was abruptly split into two by a wall which separated the “Spinelli territory” from the “Arduino territory”.

“Altiero Spinelli”, however, soon started to expand. In the Headmistress' own words, “everyone's dream was to have the entire building for ourselves”, and the need for conquest was indeed satisfied when the increasing number of students testified the need for new classes. In a few years' time, the school found itself having three sections: a scientific, a linguistic and a mixed one, which then grew up to the current number of five, for a total of 23 classes and more than

500 students.

Looking back at the past, the school has changed quite significantly in its brief eleven years of existence, not only from the territorial point of view. On one hand, the initial freedom and support it could dispose of due to its experimental state was much greater: “Most of our difficulties have come from the regional administration. Obviously, we had to adapt to the recent school reform, but we received a good support from the Minister herself” comments Professor Citta. On the other hand, however, the linguistic initiatives have improved up to the point of making the headmistress blush with pride: “We already had the French Esabac program running, but the introduction of the Chinese option was just a fantastic score; now we also have an International German project and Cambridge will allow us to prepare our students for the IGCSE exams!”

The initial, unconfessed dream was to make this school a European center. We're all working on it.