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Italian schoolactivities : italiana del uniform della scuola activities
Italian School Activities: Coming and Going to School
Figure 1--Here we see a Rome Safety Patrol boy stopping the trafic for a mother and nursery school boy to cross the street in 1955. Those of us who have exoerience Roman traffic know how important this is. The Patrol Boy wears a school smock, probably blue with white gloves, white belt, and shoulder strap, and carries a rather small lollipop sign. The nursery school boys wears a bib-front romper suit. Notice the ancient Roman aqueduct in the background. The news service caption read, "Safe Keeping: A youngster from Rome's Armando Diaz Elementary [Primry] School halts motor traffic while pedestrians cross a busy street, during the fifteen minutes after school in which a traffic squad of ten pupils regulates trffic so that their school mates can get across the heavily trafficked intersection of downtown Rome. Each of the junior 'cops' has a destinctive uniform, identifiable by motorists. Trained to handle many problems arising from traffic management, the boys have been commended for their important work. The safety patrol is named after an American boy, Johnnie Minadeo, son of Italian immigrants, who was killed in New York last October while directing the the traffic outside a school building."
Most Italian school children walked to scool Rgis was primarily the case of primary school children. Schools at first weemostly in cities and children lived in wlking distance of their primary schools. The youngest children might be accompaned by older siblings, but until after World War II not usually by their parents, There was an eception for the really young children in nursery school. Here parets did commonly walk with them to school. As We nore with the development of cars and traffic the aoption of safty patrols, especilly after World war II. Even in rural areas walking to school was common. This is because many rural people lived in villages rather than isolated fmily farms as in America. We beliee that more Italian parents walk younger rimary children to school today than was common earlier. There is a precived greater risk today than was the case earlier. We are not sure to what extent this reflecs relality. Some parents may even drive them to school, especially at private schools where the distances are longer. We see some school buses, but these were commonly for private schools. we are less sure about secondary schools, especially before Word War II when most children did not continue their education beyond primary schools. As a result most children lived much further from secondary schools than primary schools. We are not sure how common bikes were. Before World War II, relatively few children had bikes.
