Sunday 3 March 1968, following the grave situation in the schools, the clashes of the previous Friday at the Faculty of Architecture at Valle Giulia in Rome, and as was happening at the same time in numerous university faculties across Perugia and Italy, the fine-arts students of Perugia occupied the ancient Accademia at San Francesco al Prato. The Accademia was no stranger to mobilisations and occupations: as early as 1964 the struggle for a change in the teaching and for transfer to the state began precisely with a very early occupation of the spaces of the old former convent, then home to the Accademia, to the Istituto d’arte and to the attached middle school alike. The students did not confine themselves to the unheard-of act of interrupting the regular course of teaching but barred all access, raising during the night a veritable brick wall to seal the great door onto the square, thus arousing the wrath of the local right-thinking folk, still unversed in student struggles, who thundered in the local chronicles and in the city’s genteel drawing rooms against the rebels.

A few days after the events of March 1968, the Council of Professors declared its solidarity. It was then made up of leading figures of Italian cultural life such as Pio Baldelli, a pioneer of the notion of counter-information and a theorist of mass communication; the historians and critics Nello Ponente and Filiberto Menna; the philosopher Francesco Francescaglia; the artist Dante Filippucci; and the set designer Enzo Rossi, father of the architecture student Paolo Rossi, who died at the University of Rome on 27 April 1966, the victim of a fascist assault. The inauguration of the 422nd academic year, in February 1968, was graced by the art historian Giulio Carlo Argan with the inaugural address Art in the Consumer Society in the presence of the President, the Honourable Salvatore Valitutti, who in his opening speech stressed the need for a reform of the Academies of Fine Arts and the Istituti d’arte.

On 29 March 1968, with the school still occupied, the representatives of the students in struggle were admitted to the Academic Council and presented a document in thirteen points which called, beyond the transfer of the school to the state, for a profound change in the course syllabuses and in particular: the possibility for students to propose counter-courses; the presence of student representation within the decision-making bodies; the recruitment of teachers through public competition; the establishment of scholarships; access to the university canteen; the discussion of examination marks in open session; the production of handouts for the theory courses; the acquisition of books for the library; the abolition of the teachers’ private studios; the adaptation of the classrooms to teaching needs; periodic meetings with figures from the world of culture, art and industry; and spaces reserved for students and for organising exhibitions, including outside the San Francesco al Prato premises. Of the students’ demands, only access to the university canteen would prove feasible straight away. The students were Paolo Mancini, Stelio Taddei, Piero Pagliochini, Carlo Iavarone and Osvaldo Ciarapica. The last of these, like the students Antonio Todini and Gianfranco Ercolanoni, remained to work at the Accademia after graduating, taking part in the subsequent struggles of 1974, during which the Minister of Public Education Franco Maria Malfatti was given a rough reception with banners at once political and artistic. These struggles, often led precisely by these three former students, now teachers, brought about in 1974 the alignment of the staff’s employment contract with that of the state academies, while those of 1977 led, in the years that followed, to the regularisation of the contracts of the untenured teachers, to a change of leadership and to a new teaching era at the forefront in Italy. The teaching body, regularised and enlarged by the arrival of new teachers such as Bruno Corà, Antonio Gatto, Bruno Paglialonga and Adriano Urbano, was coordinated by the director Giorgio Ascani, the artist from Città di Castello commonly known as Nuvolo, a witness and leading protagonist of post-war Italian art, who in those years lived in Rome and was in contact with the finest of the Italian art world. Thus began the conceiving and realising of a form of teaching that called for the presence and active participation of all the teachers and placed the students at the centre of a formative process in step with the times of art, offering encounters with artists, the organisation of exhibition events and interdisciplinary seminars on fundamental questions of art. The Accademia of Perugia was the first to embark on a practice later imitated in other academies, and it was spoken of throughout Italy as a new pole of teaching, almost a new Bauhaus. Invited were Michelangelo Pistoletto, Enrico Castellani, Luciano Fabro and the artists and students of the Casa degli Artisti in Milan, Giulio Paolini, Sol LeWitt, who left a most important Wall drawing, still visible today, along the entrance corridor of the Accademia, and Marco Bagnoli, Marisa and Mario Merz. With many of these, collaborations too were born which, as in the case of Osvaldo Ciarapica and Marco Bagnoli, issued in the production of a number of works.

This situation was among the reasons that led me to sit a professorial competition in 1983, which also brought into the teaching body the engraver Marilena Scavizzi and the sculptor Eliseo Mattiacci. I was at once folded into the group of teachers and promptly set to work on the planning of the new academic year. In truth I had already crossed paths with Osvaldo Ciarapica in Paris, through mutual friends, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou on which I had collaborated, but we barely remembered it. After a brief examination of my consciousness as a militant, of my 1968 past in Milan and of the Roman university struggles of 1977, he let me in on the complex ‘political’ situation of the Accademia and on its relations with the city and the cultural institutions, often none too kindly disposed towards the new teaching. I soon realised that Osvaldo was an inalienable point of reference both for the students and for those of us who came from out of town, not only in all that concerned the solving of problems, of teaching and logistics and otherwise, but above all, together with Todini and Ercolanoni, as the historical memory indispensable to any strategy, as well as a hinge in relations with the local political world. We went on inviting artists and poets such as Emilio Villa, Piero Dorazio, Carla Accardi, Edgardo Mannucci and a great many others, with whom solid and lasting bonds were also woven. If Bruno Corà was the theoretical coordinator of it all, Osvaldo Ciarapica was always an irreplaceable active presence for putting the projects into practice and for marshalling the energies of the other teachers, of the students and even of former students who long kept up a bond of solidarity with the institution. All this Osvaldo did always with steadfastness of spirit and good cheer, with a direct and sincere rapport with everyone and, above all, with an unusual passion for art, which he often did not know as well as some of us, but which he grasped at once and towards which he nurtured an instinctive trust; for many years he also held the title of handsomest professor in a ranking that the students, half in jest, drew up each year.

Then the wind, too, little by little changed, and the struggle had to be taken up again against the heavy restoration that one part of the city was demanding, coming to the ‘Panther’ protests of 1990 with a long new occupation of the school. It was Osvaldo Ciarapica himself, with other teachers, who proposed that the occupied school should not close its doors but rather open them to the city, keeping the ‘alternative’ teaching alive, for he held that art, by its quality, was the most powerful and enduring weapon of struggle: public art courses were held, with lessons in art history that dealt with artistic movements such as the Bauhaus or French Situationism; performances were mounted centred on new modes of expression and on texts from the fringes that had broken away from traditional theatre; and the artist Jannis Kounellis was invited for a gathering open to the whole citizenry.

Everyone, internal bodies and institutions alike, had always declared themselves in favour of the institution’s transfer to the state, yet there was an utter want of even a single formal act to sanction it. Students and teachers, united, called for the convening of the supreme body, the Academic Corps, to vote on the request. Osvaldo Ciarapica, with Pasqualina Bianchini and many students, became on that occasion the author of a powerful performative action in which those attending the meeting were obliged, once inside, to walk along a carpet of white cloth (it was raining outside) through a narrow human corridor, of students’ bodies who questioned the passer-by, that ran from the great door all the way to the library, the seat of the meeting.

Then the situation gradually ‘normalised’, and the teachers of those years too, little by little, gave up their posts: Nuvolo, Mattiacci, Urbano, Corà, Gatto, Ercolanoni, Fabbroni, Scavizzi, Todini, and Osvaldo as well left the school bereft of his great teaching experience and human presence, to withdraw into the countryside. One of the last times we met, we recalled the long years of struggle and the hopes realised and then stifled, and we drank a bitter toast to the anniversary, by then more than half a century, of the request for transfer to the state, never granted, and which, prophetically, he knew he would never live to see.

Aldo Iori (1954), after studies in architecture, took an interest in the spatial relationships of the work of art and in the connections between the work and its place, and has addressed the work of contemporary artists in scholarly texts, curating solo and group exhibitions as well as catalogues and monographs. He has collaborated with museums, foundations, galleries and public and private institutions in Italy and abroad, and with the journals Lettera Internazionale, A.E.I.U.O. and MozArt, of which he was an editor. Until 2020 he taught at the ‘Pietro Vannucci’ Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia in the disciplines pertaining to Art History. Since 2017 he has taught at the University of Perugia and, since 2019, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He currently collaborates with the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri and the Fondazione Bassiri.