Raffa Bazine, 41, from Tunisia, and Monica Abbate, 34, from Sicily, faced the arithmetic that empties small islands. Their daughter had reached school age, and Ginostra's primary school had been shut for twenty years. Families in that position usually move — to Lipari, to the mainland, to wherever a classroom already exists.
They asked for the classroom instead. The mayor supported them. So did Patrizia Muscolino, principal of the Lipari comprehensive school, which governs every school in the Aeolian archipelago and sends its teachers out by boat. The Messina provincial education office approved the request.
That approval is not routine. Italian rules normally require sixteen pupils to form a state primary class, ten on small islands and in mountain communities. A class of one exists only by derogation.
We are in love with our paradise, nature, the sea, even the volcano looming over our homes. We don't want to leave.
The emptying began with the eruption of 1930 and continued through post-war emigration to Melbourne and New York. What remained was a village reached by hydrofoil at Pertuso, a harbour so small that passengers were once rowed ashore, and where mains electricity arrived only in the 2000s. Ginostra was evacuated when a landslide sent a tsunami across the island in December 2002.
The question the Bazine-Abbate family put to the education office is now being asked elsewhere in the archipelago. A ten-year-old girl on Filicudi has written to the government asking for the same thing, so that middle school does not mean leaving her island.
On 10 September, a teacher will step off a boat and walk up to the parish room. One child will be waiting.