Insegnare libertà. Storie di maestri antifascisti

The formation of the «new Italian» dreamed by Mussolini had to start from elementary school, the first, founding step in the process of indoctrination about fascist ideals and regimentation within society, through a paramilitary education made up of uniforms, exercises and discipline. In 1929, even prior to university professors, an oath of loyalty to fascism was imposed on elementary teachers. But not everyone bowed to the regime. Some exemplary figures of male and female anti-fascist teachers throughout Italy tried to propose models and values alternative to the official ones to their students. While fascism looked to elementary school as a place for training and forming a new child, a soldier loyal to the regime, these teachers instead aroused feelings contrasting the dominating ones: patriotism and not nationalism, ideals of freedom, solidarity, brotherhood, rather than blind obedience, violence and racism. Through unpublished documents and testimonials, Massimo Castoldi reconstructs some of these human, political and cultural tales for the first time: sometimes Catholic, sometimes more radically socialist-inspired teachers, were persecuted by the regime in various ways for their activities, throughout the whole twenty years. Some suffered marginalisation and were suspended from teaching, such as Alda Costa from Ferrara, made famous by Giorgio Bassani’s story Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti, who also knew confinement. Others were killed by the fascists, like socialist Jew Carlo Cammeo, Catholic Anselmo Cessi, the teacher from Vigevano Anna Botto, who died as a deportee at the German camp in Ravensbrück. Yet others, albeit under the watchful eye of the regime, were able to act on this side of the threshold of persecution, remaining at their desk until the Liberation. A brave and silent civil resistance against the persuasive effort of the fascist project, within the dominant inertia of an unaltered tradition of pedagogical models.