"Back to the Fields!". Elementary agricultural teaching in Italy between the late 19th century and fascism

In a country such as Italy, with an eminently agricultural population and economy, many initiatives in the field of education for rural people followed one another during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the decades, a dense network of rural schools - public and private, secular and ecclesiastical - spread along the Peninsula. In addition to the basic disciplines, great importance was assigned to the theoretical and practical teaching of agriculture and children's relationship with nature, as in the Montessori pedagogical model. Focusing on the use of practical activities and the specific training of teachers on the everchanging institutional and cultural background, the essay highlights the role of rural schools in the modernization of Italian society against the background of different cultural policies.