In the film Padre Padrone, based on an autobiographical book by Gavino Ledda, who participates in the film, Gavino's father, as he removes his young son from primary school to tend the family flock alone on the mountainside, observes to the young school-mistress, "It is not education that is compulsory, it is poverty."
To modern English eyes it is shocking to realise some way through the film, when the father has to accept a reduced price for the produce from his newly acquired olive grove (which is intended to be the family's passport to a new and much yearned for prosperity, because of new European Community regulations, how recent is the film. A few years later the prized olive trees are killed by a late frost and "this little brain", on which the peasant father proudly relies, leads him to sell almost all the family land and aim at that elusive prosperity and security by investing the money in the bank at ten per cent interest, whilst sending out his children as day-labourers.
The book was completed in 1974 and the film made in 1977, but the near inescapable poverty of rural Sardinian society and the attendant brutality and bestiality seem a world away from our lives. Yet the 'compulsory' primary education was in fact introduced in 1859, and had, it would appear from the film, at least brought about a general and basic level of literacy, and an awareness of a world beyond local horizons, if not a generosity of spirit. Perhaps, as Italian banks and governments now collapse and the international financial technocrats take over, thirty years and more of international tourism have changed the picture.
It is military call-up, and some of those whom he meets there, another manifestation of the grinding administration of the state, rather than any globalising prosperity, that eventually enables Gavino to break free. For those of us so distant from the kind of rural society which the film depicts, and out of which one would indeed be grateful to be 'lifted', it is almost impossible to judge whether the almost complete depression of spirit shown is a universal feature of such a life - although still lingering narrowness and resentments in relatively affluent rural societies might persuade one that it is.
