The Year 3000 | ✔️

Chapter 7

The Palazzo della Scuola. - The first school. - Middle School. - High school education. - Lesson on the influence of passion on the logic of thought.

Opposite to the Gymnasium a gigantic edifice is built austere and large, consisting of three buildings joined together by a common gallery and gardens.

These words are read on the vestibule of Greek architecture:

Wanting is power, but on condition of knowing.

Mary read this motto with surprise and with admiration and turned to Paul said to him:

- Oh how much wisdom in these few words! It seems to me that the whole science of life is placed in them. They can serve as a fundamental stone for the art of being happy and for all pedagogy. And who will think them?

- I believe that all the men of common sense will have them, since the germ of all great truths is placed in every well-organized brain; but the one who pronounced them for the first time was a citizen of Florence, who lived towards the end of the nineteenth century; who was a deputy, mayor of his city and also minister. His name was Ubaldino Peruzzi, and he was witty, active, full of salt attic and common sense. And to prove it would suffice these holy words, which today we see carved in gold letters on the Palazzo della Scuola.

At the Palazzo della Scuola you go up a wide staircase, at the top of which just in the middle you can see a colossal statue, which represents Science.

That statue is cast in electro , a metal made of a silver, palladium and aluminum alloy, which wins the snow in whiteness and exceeds all the most dazzling metals known in antiquity. When the sun illuminates it, it shines with so much light, that as soon as you can look at it and in the night it shines even more, always illuminated by electric light.

The statue has two big eyes made of diamond, that with the sun and the electric light seem two stars. He looks towards the sky smiling, as if spying on the distant horizon, and with his right arm facing up he holds a torch, which with the artifice of different lights, of the colors of the iris, spreads all around like so many radiant rays.

The Palazzo della Scuola is in a square at a certain height, so that the statue seen in the night from every point of the city looks like a lighthouse.

And in fact it is the lighthouse of Andropoli, it is the light of science, which from the capital of our planet seems to illuminate the whole world.

And was it not science, the one that led men to search for the true and the good?

And it was not perhaps science, which transformed the shaggy and ferocious savage, prey of wild beasts and hurricanes, into the beautiful and powerful man who leads the lightning, pierces the continents, and who made him absolute master of his planet and the does he hope in the year 3000 to let his planetary colleagues hear his voice?

Paolo and Maria, having entered the vestibule of the palace, learned that the three buildings of which it is composed are dedicated to the three great branches of teaching:

The first school.

Middle School.

High studies.

They wanted to visit the first school accompanied by one of the masters, who offered them as a guide.

They quickly went through the large, well-ventilated rooms, flooded with light and pure air and where the schoolboys sit; one separated from the other and seated in a comfortable chair with the respective desk.