Obituary/Nachruf

Lucia Lumbelli (Trieste 1937 – 2019) was one of the most representative figures of the Italian science of education in recent decades. Graduated in Philosophy at the University of Trieste, after her degree she moved to Milan as an assistant at the Education Institute of State University. There she collaborated actively with another great Triestine educationalist, Egle Becchi. While in Milan, she carried out intensive research with the Agostino Gemelli Institute of filmology, producing what today are classic studies on the understanding of the language of film in childhood and on its importance in educational terms. In 1975 she was made Full Professor at the University of Parma. In 1987 she was given the Chair of Experimental Education at the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Trieste, to eventually move, upon its creation, to the Faculty of Psychology. In retirement from 2010 on, she was nominated Professor Emeritus by the Ministry of Education, University and Research, and continued to attend the Department of Life Sciences until a month before her death, brought about by a terrible disease that had struck her six years earlier. Nevertheless, she continued working up to the last on her two final scientific articles, completing them a week before her death. Lucia Lumbelli’s research focuses upon the child’s language, understanding, and communication. On the theoretical level her references were, on the one hand, the pedagogy of Gestalt – in the version of Wolfgang Metzger (whose fundamental work Psychologie she translated with the publisher Giunti, Florence) – and the “activism” of Georg Kerschensteiner; on the other hand, the so-called “non-directive psychotherapy” of Carl Rogers, seen not so much from a therapeutic point of view as from that of the theorization of non-authoritarian communication. In addition to an impressive body of scientific articles, published in the most important journals, both Italian and international, of the science of education, she has left numerous volumes that constitute a sure point of reference in Italian educational psychology. Among these we remember Comunicazione non autoritaria (1972), La comunicazione filmica (1972), La comprensione come problema (2009).