Teresa Manes, mother of Andrea Spezzacatena: “I dedicate the life that remains to teach me kindness, because words can hurt, but also heal the world”

In the last year Andrea’s voice has materialized in a new form, getting strong thanks to the film The boy with pink trousers. The film has focused a lighthouse on something that can no longer be taken undergrown and, like the book and the testimonial voice, has become a care device and essential didactic tool.

The other day, which is not far from the one in which I write, precisely I thought of this while I turned to over five hundred students, who came to Oderzo to listen to me. I observed them, silent, with the body stretched forward, as a sign of attention. There was a boy who tried to distract his partner who was sitting next to him, but he didn’t give him twine. And, in seeing this, I remembered when she entered my class, at the time when I was a young high school clerk, a dad to say that the son, our partner, would not have come. He had sat on a chair, next to the chair where he was the Mathematics teacher, who was so old but never as much as that father, wrapped in his camel -colored Paltò.

He had come to tell us precisely that theThe son, for too much study (he had ten in all the subjects), had been the subject of a nervous collapse and therefore had been withdrawn from school. I was sitting at the last bench and I could not stand the sight of the misery of the pain of that father whose name I do not remember and not even the face, but which I remember curved by the weight of impotence. Thus, in front of the five hundred students of Oderzo, I tried closeness for that young disturbing, who tried to hide his inability to govern the emotions in gestures that everything were except empathic, just as had happened to me on that distant day.

Perhaps, and I write it without too much arrogance, I can say that my words will remain impressed to him more than any other of those present because, for the first time, in a direct, straightforward, authentic way, that boy did exactly what, in theory, had been described to him as emotional learning, but that now “he had arrived” without too many ghigarians.

Since 2012 I have seen the foundations of a change that involved the school in the first place, which was spurred, especially by some legislative interventions, to favor awareness encounters on various social issues in general, and on the theme of bullying and cyberbullying in particular. Moreover, it could not have been otherwise given that bullying is the anticipator of the major social evils.

In recent times, alas, alas, A crescendo of youth violence that can be linked to many causes. But there is one, in particular, what a notice as the matrix of the whole and that individual in the violence of verbal language. We should start from the re -education of language because, in my opinion, language favors the formulation of thoughts that produce actions capable of transforming into habitual behavior. In essence, if I feed on kind thoughts, I produce equally kind thoughts that will then transform into individual positive actions.

I don’t know if things happen for a reason or if we want to find a reason for not being overwhelmed by the things that happen to us. But I know that I am dedicating the life that I have to spread as many peace seeds as possible. And the silence of the guys who accompany my words, let it flow like a river in full, I legitimize myself to say that that cultural change is not a chimera. Young people need examples that spur them on to believe in themselves, reminding us that the word is alive and can be a friend of all of us.
Let’s use it carefully.
It will certainly be grateful to it.

© 2025 Mondadori Libri spa, Milan.

The new edition of the book by Teresa Manes, Andrea, beyond the boy with pink trousers, Thirteen years after the suicide of his son Andrea Spezzacatena, he is now in in bookstore for blacksmiths. The powerful testimony of a mother and her fight against bullying.