The most interesting candidate at the 2026 Maturità, Italy’s school-leaving exam, wasn’t one of the more than five hundred thousand eighteen-year-olds sitting down for the first paper, but a man who goes by the name Pupo. Enzo Ghinazzi, 70, singer, television personality, a long career, marriages, debts, casinos, Russia, songs everyone knows and some pretend not to know, has decided that now that he’s had a full life he can turn to the minor things: Pirandello, globalization, the diploma, maybe a degree in Communication Sciences.
The exam that is supposed to certify entry into adulthood becomes the place where a seventy-year-old turns back into a kid, while the kids ask each other on Twitter: “WAIT WHAT DO YOU MEAN BRANCATI CAME UP BUT MORE TO THE POINT WHO IS BRANCATI”. Capitals and missing punctuation as in the original. Someone replies: “Never heard of him in my life, but just like Moravia 3 years ago the unknown one turns out to be the best prompt of the year”.
Not knowing who Brancati is is no tragedy. They’re not afraid of looking ignorant or ridiculous the way we hung-up adults are, so they don’t rush off to ask Google, Wikipedia or ChatGpt who he is; what they care about is letting everyone know he wasn’t on the syllabus.
Someone commented that the kids who sat the exam alongside Pupo “will have an anecdote to tell”. But if they don’t know Moravia, will they know Pupo? We started calling forty-year-olds kids too, then fifty-year-olds, then sixty-year-olds, and now we end up entering adulthood somewhere around seventy. It used to be that you took the maturità to become a grown-up. Now you become grown-up enough to be able to take the maturità.
There’s only one thing more predictable than the stories people tell about their own maturità: the row over the prompts. This year just one woman out of seven on offer, and none in the textual analysis. Let the candidate argue whether maturità prompts should be demographically representative.
I can’t start from my own maturità because I’ve forgotten it. All I remember is that it was very hot, and you can’t say that or you come off as a climate denier. I have no idea what I thought back then, and that even seems healthy to me. Whatever I thought, it was probably wrong. Every year we talk about it a little out of nostalgia, a little because we like telling our own story, a little because the papers have to fill the space on the page. Above all, the maturità is that moment when we pretend to be talking about the kids only to talk about ourselves.
The most-chosen prompt was the one drawn from Mario Calabresi’s “Alzarsi all’alba”. Who better than the generation that invented burnout to try their hand at the toil of those who get up at dawn? Someone probably thought it was a text about the ones who go out to party, come home late and then have to make it to class.
In fact the prompt was chosen above all by technical and vocational schools, more attuned to the imagery of sacrifice, toil, perseverance. The licei preferred Wenke Husmann, the only woman on the list, with an article on the capacity to let ourselves be amazed: apparently it makes us more sociable and generous, cuts stress and improves our understanding of the world. Maybe someone played the easiest card of all: I’m amazed the ministry picked a woman!
The maturità is the only rite left innocuous enough for everyone to use it as an excuse to talk about something else: the kids about what they don’t know, the adults about their own nostalgia, Pupo about his milestones. It isn’t the entrance into adulthood, it’s the return to our eighteen-year-old selves.
Among the prompts there was also Frank Furedi, a Hungarian-born, naturalized British sociologist, who argues the importance of boundaries. Boundaries that have evidently collapsed in the ones he calls adultescents, given that parents and children now share cultural consumption, interests, language. The ministry was asking eighteen-year-olds, but the ideal candidate was Pupo.
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