A happy place

The Italian language school of the Arsenale della Pace becomes an opportunity to create relationships and welcome each person with their own story.

Hospitality
A school that is always open, even when all the others close, completely free for those who attend, where it is possible to enroll at any time of the year.
It is the Italian language school for foreign adults of the Arsenale della Pace, attended by men and women who come from more than thirty different countries in the world. A project possible thanks to the availability of over fifty volunteers who take turns on different days of the week. The enrollment interview aims to evaluate the level of knowledge of the Italian language of the newcomer and the class in which he or she can be placed based on his or her linguistic skills, but above all to listen to his or her story. Students come from the suburbs of the entire planet and start their lives here: there are those who have never picked up a pencil and do not even know which side to hold a notebook, those who proudly show off the degree they earned in the country where they were born and raised.
The goal is to welcome the person with their needs, accompanying and orienting each one in the last part of their journey, the arrival without an instruction booklet, in a world of which, in addition to the language, they cannot understand the entry and acceptance procedures, risking being left on the margins as unexpected and unwanted guests.

Mediation
There are asylum seekers in the anguished wait to understand what will happen to their application.
Women victims of abuse and violence, homeless men, families in a new world, people with a very different cultural and migratory background, who find a happy place where they can spend their mornings, in a safe, warm, clean, welcoming, structured context. Every student, male and female, knows at any time that they can talk to someone, ask for advice, find a listening ear and recognition, express their discomfort and concern for all the things they absolutely need but continue to chase in vain: home and work, documents and the possibility of being reunited with their loved ones.
Some people just need to feel understood and listened to: interviews, spaces for dialogue and care allow to lower the level of anger and discontent of those who find a thousand obstacles in their path towards reaching a condition of stability and real autonomy.

Orientation
Students can have privileged access to other services available at Sermig.
For example, the medical clinic, the distribution of clothes, night shelter, baby-parking for those who bring very young children.
Direct contacts with organizations, institutions and training centers that operate in the area allow us to keep the doors open to the real world for those who are already able to take a step further in their educational path: for example, the protocol for the widespread school signed in recent days with the CPIA (Provincial Centers for Adult Education), provides for the presence of a teacher for the best students, who in an advanced level class can take the A2 certification in Italian, the last step before the middle school diploma. On the other hand, there are those who disappear from one day to the next, forced to accept undignified working conditions and enter into exploitation logics, because they have left small children at home who need to eat, the only goal is to send back the money as soon as possible.

Concern
There are women victims of trafficking who no longer trust anyone.
Mothers originally from the Maghreb who experience school as an opportunity to leave home and be outside, have lived in Italy for years but do not know a word of Italian, have dedicated their lives to having children and raising children and are now starting to explore and learn about this strange world that their children call home. Many students instead come from South America, they have chosen to emigrate due to political instability and the lack of security in countries such as Argentina, Venezuela and Peru. People who were doing well, people who were already living a normal life, but who could no longer resist the violent context in which they were forced to live. A boy in the enrollment interview shows on his cell phone the images from the surveillance cameras of his shop that went up in flames: the threats with firearms, the kidnapping in a car that took him away in the night, the work of a lifetime gone up in smoke in a few minutes.

Time
Students move from class to class based on their language skills.
The classes do not have assigned seats, you arrive and sit where there is a free chair, there is no set time and there are no exams to move up a level. The emotional state and predisposition to study of the person determine the length of the course, but no one is sent away because they go too slowly, it is a low-threshold service that welcomes people with multiple problems who are not yet able to fit into the institutional course. Volunteers are asked not to go into the merits of the person's history, because the risk would be to open wounds that would be too big. Among the many helpers who keep the school open every day, there are those who have specific training as teachers and those who work alongside those with more experience to acquire methodologies and communication strategies. Everyone feels at least for a few hours that they belong to the same community, there is no difference between those who welcome and those who are welcomed, there are rules to respect, but no one is considered a problem, it is a meeting between people who discover that they all have the same value.

Future
Some mothers, in order to attend school, bring their children with them, who become everyone's children for a few hours.
At first, people look at each other with distrust and suspicion, but by being in mixed classes they learn to know each other and interact in a society where men and women have equal dignity and rights, where differences in gender, culture and religion are considered an asset. Along with new requests for help and to be listened to, some old students often peep out from the door onto the street.
The second generation is now arriving at the Sermig Italian school: the first students return and bring their families, to greet and share the joy of those who have made it, to celebrate the signing of a regular work contract or the arrival in a real home, explaining in perfect Italian that all this would not have been possible for them without having been here.
They are the new Italians, men and women who are building their future in our country, giving birth and raising their children here, it is the preview of a new society, multicultural and multiethnic. Someone entrusts a friend or a relative, because they felt so good here that they didn't want to send them somewhere else, inside this school as if by magic they really managed not to feel like a stranger.
 

Marco Grossetti
Focus
NP November 2025