The 'maturità' final high-school exams got under way for around 526,000 Italian students on Wednesday with the Italian test.
The students have to write an essay choosing from one of seven questions.
Among the options was a question on 'Young people, my hope' - a message by anti-mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino, who was murdered by Cosa Nostra in Palermo in 1992.
"We learn with emotion that among the questions on the Italian written test for this year's maturità is a reference to the attention and trust our father placed in young people," Borsellino's children said in a statement.
"He nurtured enormous hope in the future generations and we always thought that his efforts were underpinned by a sense of an ambitious prospect of a change for the better in our civil society".
