Today, Friday 19 June, officially marks the time of the second written test for the 2026 Maturity, one of the obstacles most feared by the army of 527,607 candidates who face the state exam this year. At 8.30 am the Ministry of Education and Merit gave the green light to the telematic key to decrypt the ministerial texts, revealing in real time the tasks chosen for the individual study areas: from the much feared version of Latin for the Classical High School up to the complex problems and questions of geometry and analysis intended for the Scientific High School.
The tests change based on the address attended
The second paper, which alone is worth 20 points on the final grade, represents a heterogeneous mosaic that tests the specific skills of the graduates. If the Linguistics students will take the Foreign Language and Culture 1 test, in the technical institutes specializing in Administration, Finance and Marketing everything will be played on the columns of the Business Economics track. A crucial event that will engage the vast majority of kids in a tour de force of between 6 and 8 hours in total, with the canonical exceptions of Classics, limited to a maximum of 4 hours, and Artistic High Schools, where the workshops will remain open for three consecutive days.
Quintilian’s return to the Classical after thirteen years of absence
So what are the various tracks? For the Classical High School, the Ministry has opted for a great return of the literature of the imperial age, selecting a passage by Marco Fabio Quintilianus taken from the first book of the Institutio oratoria. The work, a milestone in the pedagogical reflection of antiquity, offers a track focused on the educational value of the musical discipline as a fundamental pillar for the correct intellectual evolution of the perfect Roman orator.
The structured ministerial test for the humanistic direction does not end with the simple literal translation of the original passage. Students are in fact required to undertake challenging work divided into several phases, including global understanding and interpretation of the text, linguistic and stylistic analysis, critical analysis and the development of personal reflections. The name of the rhetorician from Calagurris had been missing from the state exam benches for thirteen years: the author has in fact been proposed only three times in the recent history of the Maturity, with the last precedent dating back to 2013.
The hydrology of Lake Bracciano puts the scientist to the test
Moving our gaze to the desks of the Scientific High School, the analysis of the Mathematics questions reveals a trace that unites pure geometric abstraction with the environmental dynamics of the Italian territory. The first of the two complex ministerial problems is entirely focused on the scientific study of the water level of Lake Bracciano, a mathematical simulation applied to real hydrology which will force candidates to translate environmental flows into equations and functions. The second problem instead follows more traditional lines, offering a classic study of function formulated according to ordinary academic canons.
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