A six-year-old girl living beneath one of Europe’s most active volcanoes recently became the only pupil at a school that the Italian media is calling the smallest in Europe and where the bell hadn’t rung for the past 20 years. On September 10, 2026, Aysha went off to her first day of school in Ginostra, a tiny hamlet on the side of the Stromboli volcano, with a pink backpack and a cone of sweets in her hands. According to Italian news agency ANSA, she was visibly moved as her parents walked her in to meet her teacher, Laura Mongi, who had come down from the outskirts of Milan.
An island inside an island
The fishing hamlet of Ginostra is part of the town of Lipari, on the Italian island of Stromboli is so isolated that residents have christened it ‘the island within an island.’ With no roads connecting it to the rest of the island and access only by boat, the community is often left cut off from the rest of the world.A donkey takes care of the logistics, and water comes in by a tanker. The village once had its own primary school, but it closed decades ago when the population dwindled to around 40 residents. “The town of Lipari is spread across six different islands, Lipari, Vulcano, Stromboli, Panarea, Filicudi and Alicudi, plus the hamlet of Ginostra, which is an island in the island: even though it’s on Stromboli, it’s connected only by sea,” Abbate, who’s the town’s delegate, told the magazine Vita in February.
A letter for home
Abbate told Sicilian daily La Sicilia in January that the family would have been forced to split up. “My husband, who has a small construction company, would have had to stay here; me and the child would have had to move,” she said. “To get to Lipari we had to get up at dawn, take the hydrofoil and come back in the afternoon. But in winter it often happens that we stay stuck because of storm surges, so school attendance wasn’t guaranteed.”Abbate and Bazine, who were born and raised in Mazara del Vallo in western Sicily and has lived in Ginostra for 16 years, according to Vita. They wrote to the mayor, to the head of the Lipari comprehensive school, Patrizia Muscolino, and to the provincial school office in Messina. “Everything started when we wrote a letter explaining all the hardships we have on the island and how impossible it was to get to the other schools,” Abbate told Open. “I’d already talked about it several times in the years before; I was very determined about this choice.”Lipari’s town government filed the formal request on January 8, and the regional school office for Sicily said yes on January 19, according to the education site Orizzonte Scuola. Italian law normally asks for at least 15 pupils to open a primary class, though exceptions are allowed in places at risk of depopulation.Now local authorities have agreed to reopen it after Aysha’s parents warned they would have been forced to leave the island. The six-year-old would have to travel to a school in Lipari, the largest island on the Aeolian archipelago. Her parents, Monica Abbate and Raffa Bazine, say they have no intention to leave and insist their daughter is happy as the sole student.She isn’t planning on going anywhere, though. “It’s a bare-bones life. You don’t have the comforts of the city: we have just one grocery store that’s open all year,” she told Open. “But here you figure out what the real priorities are, and everything gets freer, less driven by consumerism. My daughter is growing up close to nature; here you always get around on foot. I’d never change my life.”“We love this little paradise, the nature, the sea, even the volcano that looms over our homes. We don’t want to have to leave,” Bazine told Italian news outlet Ansa. “She hangs out with peers who stay here for months at a time, and she’s learned a few words of German from the neighbours’ children who go on vacation in Ginostra. She’s a happy child,” the parents said.“Emergencies? We’ve had plenty of them with the floods of recent years,” Abbate told Vita. “And then we’re under an active volcano, so for us it’s always staying on alert. Do I think it’s dangerous? I think there are many more dangers in the city.” On Etna, Sicily’s other famous volcano, skiers kept carving turns in December 2025 even as ash and smoke rose behind the ridge line.
A school for a student
The new school will feature a single classroom in a building owned by the local parish of the Catholic Church. “The opening of the school is ‘a sign of solidarity for this isolated community’,” said Riccardo Gullo, the village’s mayor. “Schooling should be ‘a fundamental right’, even for people living in remote areas,” he added.Father Nino Pirrotta, the parish priest, said, “Schools are not just a place of learning; they are a focus for the community.”The teacher will follow a customised ministerial program, marking a significant precedent for the protection of the right to education in geographically disadvantaged areas and in combating the depopulation of small Italian towns.Whether the school stays open beyond Aysha’s first year depends on how many pupils enrol in the years ahead, since a full primary cycle requires steady attendance numbers. Families on nearby islands such as Filicudi still face serious schooling gaps, showing that Ginostra’s success has not yet spread across the region. Officials have been clear that the current setup meets one family’s specific need, and broader policy changes for isolated communities remain an open question.
