The three-story school building hasn’t changed much. The blackboards still hang against the ochre-colored classroom wall. Even the morning ritual is familiar: Two students walk through the rows of tiny desks to collect the exercise books, which are still stacked inside in the same storage closet used during the late 1980s, when I was a primary school student in Castellina in Chianti. 

What has changed are the students. When I was growing up, only one of my classmates was from somewhere else, a boy who arrived from Grosseto, roughly 60 miles away, to our ancient walled town of 2,800 people. Like me, he was from Tuscany, but he seemed like an exotic stranger.