Milan: Autumn 1938
Translated from the Italian by Judith Woolf

          Ever since I was little
I always used to watch them
from my window in Via della Spiga,
the children going to school:
to the school in Via del Gesù.
          Ever since I was little
I would hear them shouting, and calling to each other,
and singing beating time with their little feet
when they did gymnastics in the fog, or even
under the rain, or in the raw new air
of Milanese springtime, without leaves;
and around midday I would run to see them leaving
that school of theirs, laden with
satchels, and rulers, and sheets of paper, and notebooks,
from my window in Via della Spiga. Mamma
used to tell me, when I was little:
...