Don Lorenzo Milani died on June 26, 1967. To document that day of more than half a century ago, a chronicle of an announced death, we had the memories of the boys, to whom Don Milani was as a master and father until the last and that of Don Bensi, spiritual father of the prior of Barbiana and others of some of the people who visited the mother’s house in via Masaccio in Florence where Milani spent the last few weeks of life. We thought we had so exhausted all the knowable details. Milani had been sick for some time and had made the last trait of his earthly experience a life lesson addressed to his “children”, aware that his time would have been short and that they would have had to get by in life without a teacher to refer to. We thought it was all. Instead, a few weeks ago Adele Corradi, who disappeared on the threshold of one hundred years last November, gave us a new story of the last days of the prior, which we did not believe as much as possible, at so much distance from the facts, After time has dispersed, for personal reasons the closest testimonies. That gift delivered to the story contained in the book: Don Lorenzo, something to complain about (edited by Cristiana De Santis and Germana remains Edizioni Clichy, where to laugh is together to say again, reiterate, but also in the calebour the meaning of “something to be laugh”, in the sense of something to be agreed on.
Not a systematic story, but a collection of ideas and letters, the systematic book – even if in Corradi’s way, more juxtaposition of daily life rooms than overall history – had already been in 2012 with I don’t know if Don Lorenzo. This is different: a sort of spiritual, social, moral testament: It is not Adele Corradi who tells Don Milani is Adele who leaves us a piece of himself and at the same time that opens a window on the rooms in which Lorenzo Milani has experienced his last hours of man and of “Christian priest” (Copyright Milani), giving us a unique document, an extra card to the mosaic that delivers Milani to history, and which, now ascertained his thickness to distance, is history with a capital.
It is not the whole book, but it is its most precious piece, because it adds a piece of knowledge that we did not have to the figure of Lorenzo Milani. But in the book there is also more: there is the point of view of Professor Corradi: the adult person who lived more closely and with greater continuity of the Barbiana school. In those pages there are experiences, filtered through the adele experience, of what Barbiana has sown in the world – very interesting about the exchange with Father José Luis Corzo -, of what could still sow if only one thought how Corradi did not only with his ironic wisdom and with his disenchantment, but also listening to the direct experience that Corradi has had.
In the book, however, there are not only Don Lorenzo Milani and his human affair, there is also Adele Corradi as it was until the end: one Person endowed not only with irony but of autonomy of thought and intellectual honesty, capable of looking with a critical spirit so much in the way the Church tells Milani today in death after having made it for a good part of the Agra, as well as to the posthumous annexation that made the world of school. Corradi was there, he lived live the bitterness of the last four years of the life of the prior and made time to assist, for decades after the death of Milani (they were almost peer) to the evolution of the attitude of the Church towards the prior confined to Mugello who in the midst of nothing had transformed the void into the sounding board. Don Lorenzo, something to complain about It is all the more precious book because it leaves the Church and the school as a inheritance, which have been the heart of the human story of Lorenzo Milani, also frank questions, even uncomfortable, for this real.
