Below is a short interview conducted by Euractiv with literature teacher Francesca Procino from the Liceo Petrarca di Arezzo, who successfully completed the first module of the EUPress Teacher Training.
E: Dear Professor, how would you relate the idea of Europe to your subject?
F.C.: As a teacher of literature, I believe that individual memory is a powerful tool capable of accumulating billions of pieces of information. The myths, fables and stories that are orally transmitted from one generation to the next in all peoples have the function of transmitting the moral rules and practical prescriptions of a social group. And it is in this context that the idea of Europe was born, from the Greek mythological heritage, and then spread to the geographical and cultural landscape of a core of states that gradually, over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, became more and more interdependent. The economic and political concept of the European Union was born out of the history, the common feeling and the tangible and intangible heritage of the culture of the European states.
E: Could you explain more about how the idea of Europe is realized in the historical-literary context?
F.C.: In the first two years of history, this theme takes shape from the transition from the disintegration of the Roman Empire to the subsequent formation of the Romano-Barbarian kingdoms, taking into account, on the one hand, the political diversification of existing institutions according to geographical areas and, on the other hand, the significant migration of nuclei of people who fit into an already established civilization and transmit its historical development, and then arriving at the birth of the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne. This is where an early idea of Europe really and consciously begins to take shape, when the central part of Europe finds itself united under one ruler, one code of laws and one faith, as the very territories that constituted the Carolingian Empire later became protagonists in the process of European unification. It is at this point that the discussion of the origins of the European Community, its birth and formation process, finds a real and current meaning and function in the transition from history to the present.
E: Thank you, Professor. Finally, can you briefly describe if and how you found it interesting to participate in the first module of the EUPress Teacher Training?
F.C.:I really found the insights and materials provided to us very interesting, because it allows me to expand my knowledge, to immerse myself in the European scenario as an active and responsible teacher in the process of shaping tomorrow’s European citizenship, even if only in a small way.
