The Artigianelli Vocational Training Center is located in the heart of the ancient village of Fermo in a medieval building already in ancient times with a strong humanitarian vocation, since 1341 it was in fact a hospital for the disabled, the infirm and orphans, then a “beggar shelter”, and finally the school of the last of which Don Lorenzo Milani spoke. Crossing the long corridors, you can breathe an air of a small ancient world, the high classrooms and the Spartan style of the furnishings betray the sober and Franciscan style of concreteness, the austerity of places of prayer.
Don Sante, a young priest who arrived here from Treviso, smiling and mild-mannered, always busy with a thousand things and for whom time is never enough, awaits us in his director’s office, on the walls a portrait of Don Ernesto Ricci, the founder . He says that once here came «the scraps, boys who had failed in other schools, the neets, who do not work and do not study», those who even before went to the workshop masters, our contemporary Franti, in short.
Now, however, in many cases it is a reasoned choice, “there is a return to craftsmanship, the engineering industry is now mainly made up of technology“. Although this is still a school that prepares people to enter the world of work directly, it forms what it calls the “artisan class”.
In the labyrinth
We go down to the laboratories, in a labyrinthine building designed for other destinations, which was also a Dominican convent, accommodation for the engine airmen, home to displaced people during the war. The mechanics one is in a workshop-classroom that is still the twentieth century: the workstations with lathes, the smell of metal and lubricating oil, the gray-painted walls and the stoneware floors.
While we pause in these large rooms with high vaults, Don Sante points out that the culture of work has always been a Christian value, “in the Middle Ages it was thought to be an expression of God’s creative work”. Here 150 students are trained annually who will become electricians, plumbers, mechanics, shoemakers, he says while proudly showing the plumbing laboratory with the systems, copper coils and radiators hanging on the walls for exercises, as well as gas boilers.
“From this year we have opened a pasta making course, the kids choose these jobs also for the human relationship, and then you create something creatively satisfying with your hands”, he explains with pride. They also have problems hiring good teachers. Especially for the laboratories “it is difficult to find them, in most cases they are people who have retired, they are over sixty”.
But what was once the school for the children of the poor, the last resort to then find perhaps a humble working class job, and where the children of the proletarians of the early years of the last century found asylum, today has success rates that do envy of the most famous universities: 100% of employment in the footwear sector, 98% in the mechanics sector, 95% for thermohydraulics. On the threshold of a new digital revolution that will radically change our lifestyle, here it seems that the ancient know-how, the natural, physical one, is taking revenge on the hyper-technological and artificial one.
Dreams
Among the students of the school there is also a girl of Indian origins: Pal Anchal, with long straight hair and classic-rimmed eyeglasses. The parents come from Punjab but she was born in Italy, in Civitanova Marche. One who has very clear ideas: “I like jobs that require manual skills, making a system with my hands – she admits amused – and I’m passionate about the world of hydraulics”. It all started when her father, who was a carousel and wandered nomadic around Italy, took her with him to where he worked “and I saw these workers who repaired or maintained, worked on the mechanical parts of the amusement park, or on the wheel, in the mechanisms of bumper cars “.
Indian plumbing
He did an internship in a company, after leaving here he will go to work as a plumber. “Seeing an Indian girl doing this job is very strange,” he muses aloud. She is afraid that future clients may be prejudiced against her, because she is a woman and a foreigner. Giacomo Petrini, a tall blond boy wearing a yellow sweatshirt, will also become a plumber. He likes apartment maps and also electricity, what he calls “playing with light”.
Instead, Nicolas Lattanzi, alert eyes and quick to speak, has always loved mechanics and engines, “getting your hands dirty” claims being someone who follows Formula 1 and runs with his minibike, which always needs maintenance. In the near future he imagines himself already in a workshop repairing engines, bending over to illuminate with the lamp and check the cooling system, the fuel system, that of the brakes.
The one who, on the other hand, looks for these specialized artisans and cannot find them is the volcanic Stefano Luzi, an industrialist from Daco. «An artisan company with an industrial flair» that produces, largely on order, display cases for the furniture or fashion sector: Luis Vuitton, Dior, Gucci, Moncler.
One piece at a time
Luzi’s company needs welders, turners, millers and bending workers like its bread. «Much of the work is produced by technological support – he explains – but a small part is manual and artistic; therefore we are looking for people capable of understanding the particularity of the many products created, an entirely artisan intelligence “because the machine is industrial, but the ability to conceive the product is artisanal.
This is why he invested in the school, purchasing a sheet metal bender that he uses to supply the components of the ATMs, the machines for cutting leather and lighting, the wood sector and the metal supports of the furniture. Different and complex uses, from design to construction.
Live work that mixes high technological knowledge, innovative, and manual know-how. “Each piece is unique, you must have geometric competence, the ability to see it mentally” he says dreamily, because for him the future of a factory based in the fabulous hills of the Marche has an ancient heart.
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