L’educazione fisica per le scuole dell’infanzia nell’Italia del secondo Ottocento: dai manuali per le maestre ai primi programmi ministeriali

[Autom. eng. transl.] The contribution intends to reconstruct the developments that occurred in the educational culture of Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century around the theme of educating the body of preschool children. In the years marked by the gradual decline of aportism and the controversial process of appropriation of Fröbelian pedagogy, physical education for preschools was the subject of various didactic proposals, which from an approach strongly conditioned by the gymnastic tradition projected it in a way more and more decided towards a playful direction, then officially endorsed also by the ministerial programs of 1893. The analysis of the educational-scholastic manuals and of the 1893 programs themselves allows us to describe the evolution of the purposes and above all of the methodologies that had to innervate the motor activities for infantile schools and, following the most recent interpretative instances of educational historiography, including international ones, to reflect on the symbolic meaning attributed to the body of children within educational scenarios marked by a more or less accentuated directivity.