La professione docente in Italia meridionale nel primo Novecento. L’esperienza del maestro Ialenti in Molise

Looking at the education, the pedagogical culture and the work of Italians elementary teachers, the contribution aims to examine the teaching profession in a southern scholastic area, towards a gradual recomposition of the “geography of education” in Italy in the twentieth century. In the process of conservation, enhancement and study of historical-educational heritage, the fund kept at Ce.SI.S. of the University of Molise includes some different types of documents belonging to the teacher Giuseppe Ialenti (1881-1915), a state of service, twenty school themes and some professional correspondence. These sources offer the opportunity to reconstruct Ialenti’s personal training course and his career, as well as original information on text books and school culture of the teacher. Some diaries and school records allow to get involved in real educational practice in the early twentieth-century southern classrooms. The work adds a contribution to the studies about the work of Italian elementary teachers (Chiosso 2007; Ghizzoni 2003; Covato 1996) within the history of professionalism and teachers culture (Di Pol 2003; Bertilotti 2003; Soldani 1993; De Vivo 1986; De Fort 1984), as well as a collective prosopography of Italian educators (Chiosso e Sani, 2013; Zago 2016; D’Alessio 2016), giving light about a professional teaching model at the beginning of the national cultural and pedagogical twentieth