You cannot get lost
in a classroom

The other thing she refuses to do is decide. There is almost always a vote, and she builds the machinery for it in front of them.

Sailing, with seven possible beaches ahead of them: before choosing, what are the criteria for picking a beach? Water. Great — what else? Shade. Shade matters, yes. They got to seven criteria, as adults would, and then walked; anyone who saw a candidate called it out, the group reassembled, ran the list, and voted.

Later the same day came a genuine dilemma, and our sons were in the middle of it. They could do the second sailing, in which case there would be no ice cream; or they could have the ice cream, but she knew where the place was and it was twenty minutes on foot each way. Was it worth it? Two wanted to go. Three wanted to stay and swim. So she stopped the argument before it started and defined the terms.

An argument, she told them, is something you say that might convince other people to vote for your proposal. You have five minutes to make yours. Nobody talks back during the five minutes; you put your case, and that is all. We can go tomorrow instead, with our parents or with Jordan. Good argument. But it will not be the same tomorrow, because it will not be here. Good argument. Then the vote, which the stay-and-swim side won three to two — helped, she notes drily, by the fact that it had quietly become the boys against the girls, and there were three boys.

Critical thinking, persuasion, the discipline of listening without interrupting, and losing a vote you argued well. Over gelato.

We put the skeptic’s question to her, because somebody has to: this is charming for small children, but how do you know anyone is learning anything, once the material becomes calculus and chemistry and the things a university actually asks for?

Her answer is not about small children at all. It is about law school. She spent a year studying in Münster, in Germany, and the contrast with Italy stopped her cold. In Italy you read a great many books and you hold them in your memory, and the examination is three questions drawn from five volumes: what does that code say, what does this article say, can you recite it. You end up knowing an enormous amount.

In Germany her professor — who was also a practising lawyer, which she notes is uncommon at home — handed the students a real case from his own practice. One hour. Use every book. Use the internet. No AI. Solve it.

Then the oral: one side takes the defence, one side takes the other, and they hold the argument out loud as it would actually happen in a court. Elsewhere in the same system, she says, you learn a topic, teach it to another student, and that student is examined by the professor — and if what comes back is what you should have taught, you understood it. Transforming a thing instead of storing it. You cannot explain something to another person without having genuinely understood it first.

None of which, she is careful to say, removes the need to learn the material. That is the misconception she keeps meeting: that non-formal education means no studying and no knowledge. The knowledge is all still there. What changes is the route in, and how you check that it arrived. “It’s just about methodology.”

She is not, incidentally, only doing this. She is finishing a master’s in gender and women’s studies on an Erasmus Mundus programme — first year in Bologna, second year in Granada, where she flies in September, graduating in July. She pays for it by teaching German, A1 through B2, to adults, including a set of students living in Switzerland; and she builds each course around the person, because one of them wants grammatical structures and drills and another wants to watch four minutes of a film and then talk about it. Friends tell her she never stops. She agrees.

And then there is the magazine, which she started two years ago and which is the reason we will probably be writing about her again.

It is called Svuota Tasche — empty your pockets. The name is the dish by your front door, the one you drop your keys into when you walk in, along with everything else that was in your pockets. The point of that dish is that anything can go in it. She had noticed that the magazines she admired were only one thing: only photography, or only poetry, or only short stories, or only comics. She wanted the dish. Every art that can be printed, in one object.

Issue one is Home, and the question they put out was deliberately unanswerable. Is home where you live? Is your apartment your home? Is home your country? Is home a person? Is home a feeling, a habit, something you carry? They ran an open call, and she personally texted artists she had admired for years. What came back was poetry, short stories, essays, drawings, illustrations and comics, and it is all in Italian — printing means printing in volume, and they were not sure an English edition would find its readers. One Greek poem runs with the Greek and the Italian side by side, line for line, so that a reader can go and look up the words. She thinks the original should always be there next to the translation. The dream is a double magazine: Italian from one cover, English from the other.

Seven people make it. The InDesign work — the actual setting of the type — is unpaid and enormous, which is the only reason it is not quarterly yet.

The reason the magazine exists is a classroom. She was teaching in a high school and she could see the talent in the room; what she could also see was that the students carrying it did not believe they were good enough to send it anywhere. She knew the feeling with some precision. In her own early years of submitting short stories, the responses that came back were, in her word, awful: you are not good enough; this is an elite magazine; you do not meet the criteria. Nothing that would help a person get better. Everything required to make them stop.

So Svuota Tasche has an editorial line, and it is one sentence: we accept everything. What follows the acceptance is the work. A sixteen-year-old sent them a piece with obvious potential and the structure and word choices of a sixteen-year-old. It went back and forth six times. This part is great. Here I think you could be more precise about what you mean. This colour is a bit shady — you could saturate it. The girl returned a clean version and Artemisia told her it was perfect, and that they could still make it better.

Most magazines do not have six rounds in them, and she is not judging them for it. But her team is a teacher and a social worker and people like them, and they decided mentoring was going to be a stated value rather than a favour.

What she wants next is to get into schools with it: creative writing workshops for children and teenagers built around a single emotion — take one, describe it — because in her experience teenagers have a hard time getting those out, and an even harder time finding anyone who will listen to them properly.

We asked what she notices between a group’s first day and its last, and her first answer was not about character. It was about the clock. Nobody should assume a small child can absorb a seven-hour afternoon programme overnight. Her first session was four- and six-year-olds, and by six in the evening they were finished — the adults too, she says, but the children especially. Adapting that fast is genuinely hard, and it is worth saying out loud to a parent who is about to book.

Then the change: by the end of the second week they are braver. Most of the children who come here arrive from carefully protected lives, and it shows in the first days — I do not want to touch that, I do not want my hands dirty, I do not want my dress dirty. Then they watch it be fun, and they go, and they are children.

There was one girl she thinks about. Perfectly clear from the start: I am not touching anything, I do not care what the rosemary smells like, I am not touching it. Fine, Artemisia said; nobody is making you. Ten days later the same girl was in the middle of everything with her hands out — give me all the plants, I want to touch everything, I want to do the oil, I want to make the bag, I want to dye it — while they tipped essential oils into a pot to colour the bags they had made. She turned to Jordan and said: remember that this is the girl who a week ago would not touch a thing.

And after the courage, she says, comes the other thing, which is respect for the place. Leaving it better than you found it.

Her own favourite spot is five minutes from the school and it depends on the hour. In the morning there is shade on a swimming platform nearby; she gets into the water, climbs out, and does her stretching and her yoga there with the breeze coming off the sea.

Asked what actually makes the school work, she does not say the sea, though she thinks the sea here is the most beautiful she has seen and she is Italian, which she considers a real concession. She says the community — the staff, the children and the parents together, the certainty that whatever happens during the day you will see these people at night. In a city, she points out, having a drink with your colleagues requires organising months in advance. Here they finish, they walk, they have one drink, they ask each other how it went, they talk about work for a while.