Border schools: Life as a teacher on the outskirts of the nascent Italian state

Abstract

The aim of this contribution (taken from the book Maestre di frontiera by P. Giorgi and R. Calgaro) is to deal with the issue of birth and development in a diachronic perspective starting from historical documentary sources, such as some unpublished diaries of professors of the rural school, during the first decades of the national post-Unification up until the 1940s. The contribution proposes a particular in-depth study of the teaching figure, the difficulties of teaching in infrastructural scarcity and in remote and isolated areas, related to the feminine question.