The word that makes one free. Notes on the actuality of don Lorenzo Milani

Abstract

This essay consists of a personal testimony by the author and a related sociological reflection on the reasons for the enduring relevance of the extraordinary figure of don Lorenzo Milani for our newborn community of earthly destiny. The personal testimony underlines the notable relevance of this figure in the youthful formation of the author, who was coming from an atheist-communist family and cultural background, and, more broadly, in the taking shape of that “wind of freedom” that characterised the 1960s, even before their effervescent ending. The reflection aims at highlighting how the poverty of word, the word that makes one free, at the centre of the “inverted paideia”, on the side of the last, realised by don Milani in Barbiana, characterises our vertiginous present no less than that distant post-war period, albeit in profoundly different forms, due to the radical techno-economic, socio-cultural and ecological-political transformations that have taken place since then.