Garibaldi narrato e celebrato nelle scuole elementari nel primo centenario della nascita (1907). Il caso di Milano

Among the events planned to mark the first centenary of Garibaldi’s birth (4 July 1907), the municipal authorities in Milan organized a special commemorative program for the city’s elementary schools, including lectures at individual schools, the distribution of Storia dei Mille narrata ai giovinetti [History of the Thousand as told to young people] by Giuseppe Cesare Abba, and the parading of a delegation of elementary students in front of the Garibaldi monument in Largo Cairoli. Numerous scholarly publications have examined perceptions of Garibaldi and the impact of the mythography surrounding him in post-Unification Italy. In recent years, key analyses have been undertaken - within broader inquiry into the development of a civic religion for the newly united nation - on how this religion was introduced into schools and how the education system contributed to shaping a national identity. No existing study, however, has examined the role of schools in building up a public image of the “hero of two worlds” as part of the effort to construct a shared memory of the national unification process. This essay is intended to fill that gap, albeit only in part, by presenting research on the involvement of elementary schools, specifically in the city of Milan, in commemorations of Garibaldi on the first centenary of his birth. The primary focus of the study was to investigate the image of Garibaldi transmitted by elementary teachers in the classroom. To this end, contemporary education journals published locally in Milan – as well as those with national circulation that were likely to have been consumed by the city’s elementary teachers – were analysed with a view to reconstructing the cultural message then on offer about Garibaldi. This line of inquiry was completed by examining biographies of Garibaldi, in some cases authored by schoolteachers, that were advertised in the above-mentioned periodicals, and had been published for the centenary with a child readership in mind. Further analysis was devoted to assessing how this specific instance of patriotic pedagogy was actually received: the voices of elementary pupils were accessed via a corpus of documentary material held in the archives of the City of Milan, including a large number of letters sent by schoolchildren to the education councillor of the day to thank him for giving them the opportunity to participate in the centenary celebrations.