Venice was unusually quiet for a warm summer evening. Despite the recently relaxed travel restrictions, its streets remained uncrowded with tourists. For once, they could be found, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the locals, observing an authentically Italian tradition: tucked away in the courtyards and bars, they watched football. It was the night of the Euros final between Italy and England: the 1-1 score led to penalty shootouts and, finally, to Italy’s victory.
The once Most Serene Republic erupted in raucous celebration. Football chants were followed by patriotic songs, quickly turning into slurred shouting and drunken brawls. Gangs of tifosi, rowdy Italian sports fans, roamed the streets shouting ‘Italy is king!’ at tourists in broken English. Once they’d had their fill of gloating, those same fans would quickly switch to friendly banter, buying drinks for me and other foreigners and inviting us into their homes after mere minutes of conversation. These were all aspects of Italy that I had already grown to know and love, yet a particular interaction that night revealed a new and unexpected side of the bel paese. As one such exchange with a group of football fans somehow transitioned into a rather heated discussion of English literature, an Italian- football-jersey-wearing and flag-waving high school student suddenly proclaimed:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
My shock was only strengthened by his explanation that he was forced to memorise the opening lines of Eliot’s The Waste Land by his school’s literature teacher. No, he answered, he did not go to some elite English-language school. Neither was this an isolated case of some overzealous literature teacher, as I have since heard other Italians recount studying English literature in the original dating back to The Canterbury Tales. British education, in comparison, keeps its students at a safe distance from Chaucer and his contemporaries until university. I would be hard pressed to find any British students who know English poetry well enough to recite it by heart, much less foreign language literature.
It seemed that Italy had not only claimed victory on the pitch that night but also demonstrated a staggering superiority to Britain in its foreign language and literature education. Yet, as anyone who has stepped foot outside the historical centres of Italy’s most touristy towns can confirm, general English ability is nowhere near as impressive as my experience with the poetry-reciting football fan would suggest. My work as an English teacher in Italy revealed that many Italian students are stumped by the words in a Rupi Kaur poem, which the EF English Proficiency Index confirms by placing it 32nd out of 35 European countries in 2024. These conflicting accounts leave us with the paradox of students graduating from the same country’s state-school system with strikingly different levels of foreign language ability.
This disparity is partly explained by the specialised nature of Italian secondary education. Just over half of Italian students attend a liceo, an academically focused secondary school aimed at preparing students for university, distinct from an istituto, which teaches skills for specific trades and industries. Among them an even smaller fraction enrols in a liceo linguistico or liceo classico, schools centred around language and literature education, offering at least three foreign languages, of which English is almost always obligatory. Students on these tracks read Dickens, Shakespeare and even older and more challenging works in the original. Instead of teaching widespread fluency, this system cultivates a relatively small cohort of students with exceptional linguistic and literary knowledge. However, this does not resolve the question of how Italian students seem to know a much wider range of texts than their peers in the UK, where secondary schools are even more specialised. Students can choose to focus on studying languages and literature, as I did, by tailoring their GCSE and A Level selection, but the resulting knowledge is strikingly modest by comparison.
Proponents of the British approach to literature education may accuse my judgement of being too hasty, as the quantity of difficult texts read and memorised is an admittedly superficial benchmark for assessing the quality of education. The same Italians mentioned above, who demonstrated an astonishing familiarity with English-language literature, have almost unanimously complained about the education in their licei. They describe the curriculum as needlessly demanding, while teaching little beyond the ability to read long texts in as short a time as possible. Students are expected to recite verse after verse of Dante and Shakespeare with little time to explore the more intricate aspects of the literature’s structure and content.
The British approach, by contrast, is rooted in the practice of close reading, a method of literary analysis developed in the Anglosphere over the twentieth century. It asks students to engage with shorter passages in painstaking detail and understand both what the text says and how it says it. Instead of reading and memorising a large quantity of material, students are trained to interpret and evaluate text by analysing the interplay between its formal structure and content. These interpretive skills are transferable: they prepare pupils to question, argue and recognize nuance, abilities that extend far beyond the study of literature and are sorely needed to critically examine the outside world.
The football-jersey-wearing high school student reciting English poetry by heart made a lasting impression by giving me a glimpse of what language and literature education can and should achieve. These subjects teach students how to view the world from other perspectives: reading literature gives us a glimpse of its author’s thoughts, while foreign languages allow us to extend this understanding to other cultures. Applying those same abilities of understanding to Italian education allows us to learn from it. The breadth of literature that Italian students read is undoubtedly impressive, even though achieving it may not be worth sacrificing the skills of in-depth analysis taught in British schools. The ability to read difficult texts in foreign languages, however, is an aspect of British education that lags embarrassingly far behind its Italian counterpart. The empathy and intercultural understanding gained by viewing the world as it is presented by a foreign literary tradition is sorely needed in the UK.
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