I too found your letter to President Ciampi a great help and I would like to thank you. I am a German lettrice at the University of Bari and I forwarded your Ciampi appeal to lots of people.

You say you are curious to know who we are and why we are in Italy: Well we each have our own story and there are many different ones, all very interesting. In my case I fell in love first with the Italian language, then with Italian politics (it was the time of Enrico Berlinguer and I was not completely aware of what was happening, for example the Aldo Moro case) and finally – how could it have been any different? – I fell in love with an Italian.

I am officially qualified to teach letters (German letters, of course) and philosophy at upper secondary school level but this has not been recognised here in Italy for reasons that always fail to give a proper evaluation. Now, after Lisbon, there might be a ray of hope, but I am tired.

Finding a teaching job at university, despite the miserable salary and absolute professional discrimination, was a fortune for anyone living in southern Italy. I do not want to get involved in useless polemics about Italy – and I say this in all conscience because I am convinced that many Italians think as I do and are also fighting for an Italy in which the word “justice” can be spelt with a capital “J”, etc. – but you know well that for those who simply want to work it is not easy to survive here in the South.

Within our University we have also had declarations of solidarity in our favour but they never go any further than that. Take Bari as an example. In 2002, in order to meet the requirements of law 509, the academic Senate passed a teaching regulation in which we do not exist. We now point this out to everyone. We explain that we cannot enter a lecture room “if we do not exist” and we get told “anyway, you are only providing assistance for individual students”. Just think – I have courses with 60-80 students. I wish I could provide “individual assistance”.

And all of this to deny the magic word “teaching”. So we resort to the only means we have left, namely “individual assistance”. We go into the classroom and answer students’ questions.

A few weeks later we were offered the opportunity of having a commission set up to evaluate the problem and find a solution. In order to show our good will, our spirit of collaboration and, above all, our solidarity with students, we began to teach lessons again even though we were in open disagreement with the teaching regulation.

A year later the commission held an updating meeting. We once again took up “service according to regulations”, but this time without actually entering the classroom, which you are not in fact allowed to enter unless you are authorised to teach.

So the commission met and managed to come up with a formula that was inexact but which was more or less decent, namely that “language experts take part in teaching”. They promised to insert us into the official formula of the teaching regulation, which required a decision from the academic Senate.

Well, more than a year has passed but the academic Senate has still not placed the proposal on its agenda.

We are now well and truly tired of being led up the garden path. The commission met again on Tuesday 16 March. We await their concrete proposals within the next week and we shall let you know what happens!

Brigitta Flau

German Lettrice

University of Bari, Italy