This contribution aims to reconstruct and critically analyze the pedagogical experience of the “Mensa dei bambini proletari” (Proletarian Children’s Canteen) of Naples (1973-1981), situating it within the educational, social, and political processes traversing Southern Italy between the 1960s and 1980s. Within a cultural framework marked by stereotypical and marginalizing representations of Southern Italian childhood, the “Mensa” experience emerges as a political-pedagogical praxis capable of conjoining social justice, community education, and democratic participation. This praxis reasserts the South’s active role in processes of educational innovation, in contrast to reductive and deterministic perspectives on the Southern Question.