Tales and experiences of school spaces: a choir of voices, between Unification and Fascism in Bologna (Italy)

For some time, international school historiography has been investigating the material culture of schools, the teaching tools and furnishings constituting the setting of the actions of teachers and students in the class. The purpose is to reconstruct the genealogy of objects, their description and use in school spaces, to understand the methods of the 'black box' of schools over time and reconstruct the scholastic and empirical culture of schools. In this regard, the question of space is crucial, understood as both school architecture and classrooms, investigated in France, the UK and Spain. There are also a number of Italian studies of the spaces of education and schools, although with some differences in approach. For this reason, the following pages offer an overview of the main legislative developments that contributed to describing school buildings, and the classroom setting in particular, in Italy, a backdrop for staging a series of voices narrating school spaces, also in a new and different interpretative key. For this specific objective, the investigation will focus its attention particularly on a local case study, concerning the school spaces in the city of Bologna between the 19th and 20th centuries, based on various sources describing not only the legal and real spaces but also, where possible, the space experienced in terms of emotions, feelings, actions, the space inhabited and used by the students and teachers. This contribution explores the subject of school spaces, and classrooms in particular. Set against the background of the national investigations of the ‘casa della scuola’ (‘the school building’) and the legislation of the time, we aim to reconstruct the school interiors, understood as a space of experience through the descriptions and narrations of pupils, teachers, school inspectors and period images taken from reports, printed sources, school books and archive documents, specifically relating to the city of Bologna (Italy) during the period between Unification and Fascism. What emerges is a difference between official legislation and the “bottom-up”, concrete reality of schools, as well as the material culture – the furniture, desks, furnishings and teaching materials -, and its historical presence and use in the class; these elements of the “black box” of schooling, offering an image of material, and above all educational, continuity and discontinuity.

Da tempo la storiografia scolastica internazionale si è soffermata sullo studio della cultura materiale della scuola, cioè sugli strumenti didattici e sull’arredo che costituiscono il setting dell’azione di docenti e studenti in classe. Lo scopo, come noto, è quello di ricostruire la genealogia degli oggetti, la loro articolazione ed uso nello spazio scolastico, al fine di cogliere le modalità della ‘scatola nera’ della scuola nel corso del tempo e ricostruire così la cultura scolastica ed empirica della scuola. Cruciale al riguardo è la questione dello spazio, inteso sia come architettura scolastica che come aula, indagati in area francese, inglese e spagnola. Anche in area italiana non sono mancati gli studi sugli spazi in educazione e nella scuola, pur con diversità di approcci. intendo ripercorrere le principali tappe normative che hanno contribuito a delineare l’edilizia scolastica, ed il setting dell’aula particolare, in Italia come sfondo su cui collocare una serie di voci narranti lo spazio scolastico, anche in una chiave interpretativa nuova e diversa. In questo contributo ho soffermato l’attenzione proprio su un caso di studio locale costituito dallo spazio scolastico della città di Bologna tra Ottocento e Novecento, attingendo a fonti diverse capaci di restituire lo spazio legale, lo spazio reale e, per quanto possibile, lo spazio vissuto da emozioni, sentimenti, azioni e lo spazio agito dai soggetti che lo hanno abitato.