The authors of the history manual in Valditara: 'We are not intimidated'

The authors of the book are also involved in the controversy over the history manual contested by the government and defended by the publisher Laterza. "We are not intimidated", they write in a letter addressed to the Minister of Education and Merit, Giuseppe Valditara, after the latter had asked the publishing house to withdraw the text from its catalogue. The owner of Viale Trastevere had defined it as "functional to the indoctrination of students" because, in his opinion, it was too critical of the Meloni government.

The authors reply to him on the point: the "school of indoctrination" is, if anything, "that of ministerial policies". And the very request of a minister to withdraw an unwelcome manual "clearly reveals which school he has in mind", that is, "the school of enslavement". The manual, entitled 'Trame del tempo 3' and intended for fifth grade students, contains critical judgments on the Meloni government. The contested sentences, which sparked political controversy, are concentrated on a single page: 666, needless to say. In that paragraph the current government is spoken of as an executive that "stands out in the implementation of clearly liberticidal measures".

The Meloni government is also described as continuing with the fascist legacy: it "came to power for the first time a century after the March on Rome and seventy-seven years after the Liberation" and is led by "a party that continues to have a close relationship with its avowedly fascist 'base'". And it is a government, we continue to read, that pursues the war on migrants with deportation plans and criminalizes the media.

These are passages written in particular by one of the authors, Carlo Greppi, but which the entire group - also composed of Caterina Ciccopiedi, Valentina Colombi and Marco Meotto - claims in full. The authors recalled how the controversy had already broken out a year and a half ago, when Valditara had turned to the Italian Publishers Association to ask for verification on the correctness of the facts reported. In recent days the controversy was reopened by the group leader of the Brothers of Italy, Galeazzo Bignami, after the text had appeared among the editorial news intended for schools.

To Valditara's request to withdraw the textbook, the publisher Alessandro Laterza had clearly refused: "A minister cannot ask to remove a textbook, regardless of its content". For the authors of Trame del tempo, the controversy "is more revealing than serious. The minister - they add - finds time for a manual page in the same weeks in which the budget law presented by his government takes away almost seven thousand positions between teachers and ATA staff from the school from 2027/28". The Democratic Party senator Francesco Verducci intervenes in support of the authors, who sees in Valditara's intervention "a very dangerous precedent, something of a totalitarian regime".