Educational spaces and ludic spaces for the leisure time of Italian Catholic youths. The formative environment offered by the parish oratory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, the Catholic Church in Italy viewed the parish oratory as the ideal setting for the reliable provision of religious training to the youth, who gathered there on Sundays and holidays not only to attend catechism and moments of prayer, but also to take part in leisure activities. These activities were conducted in a space that was specifically designed to occupy the free time of children and adolescents and protect them from the negative influence of an increasingly secularized society. Among various attempts to define the educational identity and organizational structure of the oratory, two models emerged most strongly: the first envisaged this institution as a closed environment, clearly distinct from more worldly settings and alternative to modernity; the second, in contrast, was more open to the introduction of novel leisure time initiatives that were foreign to the Catholic educational tradition – such as cinema or gymnastics – and, consequently, more open to the design of new spaces to accommodate these new activities. While the second of these models, which in the twentieth century was to become the dominant one, required the physical space of the oratories - particularly that devoted to leisure activities and entertainment - to be transformed, as symbolic spaces they remained firmly anchored to a pedagogy of prevention, primarily concerned with detaining youths, supervising them and ensuring that they spent their free time in a moral and healthy environment.