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.
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, according to Italian news agency ANSA.
The village once had its own primary school, but it closed decades ago when the population dwindled to around 40 residents. Italian law normally asks for at least 15 pupils to open a primary class, though exceptions are allowed in places at risk of depopulation. Because of storm surges, so school attendance wasn’t guaranteed. ” 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, but in winter it often happens that we stay stuck.
“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. 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. “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.
A donkey takes care of the logistics, and water comes in by a tanker. “To get to Lipari we had to get up at dawn, take the hydrofoil and come back in the afternoon. 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. The new school will feature a single classroom in a building owned by the local parish of the Catholic Church.
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.
“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.” They wrote to the mayor, to the head of the Lipari comprehensive school, Patrizia Muscolino, and to the provincial school office in Messina.