‘When you know how to read you feel like the master of your destiny’. This quotation from the conclusion of Giovanni Vigo's book reflects the complex history of the spread of literacy in Italy, its driving forces, and the means and policies for implementing it (p. 176). The quote, taken from a 1965 study on illiteracy as an international problem, was the message addressed to students of an evening class for illiterates held in Salé, Morocco. In various parts of his book, Vigo makes a comparative observation of public and private initiatives favouring adult male and female education in Europe and in the USA. The time span for Italy goes from 1850/52 to 1913; his analysis of sources is enhanced by charts and a useful statistical appendix with data for the Kingdom of Sardinia, Lombardy-Veneto, and, from 1860, the Kingdom of Italy (pp. 179–199).
Some of the topics and problems that Vigo investigates appear consistently over the centuries, from the modern age up to the nineteenth century: the scarcity and inadequacy of appropriate buildings for day and evening schools; low teachers’ salaries; the discontinuity in school attendance by students of both genders; the rural-urban gap; the disparity between schools for females and schools for males (the latter generally more numerous); the difficult relationship between school and work; the tendency for some politicians and intellectuals not to incentivise education among certain sectors of the population – namely the blue-collar workforce – to avoid creating labour shortages in the mechanical trades; and the convergence of secular and religious initiatives favouring adult education.
Vigo begins by pointing out that, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, throughout Italy and Europe and regardless of the presence or absence of scholastic institutions, learning to read, write and do sums, etc., was increasingly deemed a necessity because of the growth of government bureaucracy and the documentation it demanded (censuses, wills, passports, various notary deeds). The subjects taught in some evening and Sunday schools subsequently were also considered the most useful for work: drawing, geometry, physics, chemistry, mechanics, hygiene, history, French, the natural sciences, and civics.
For Italy, even before Unification, the most numerous sources and data are available for the Kingdom of Sardinia and for the Lombardy-Veneto region, while information on the Paduan duchies and Tuscany is scarce. The first nationwide statistics on adult education appeared in 1866: 2,803 night schools and 495 Sunday schools were registered. However, various obstacles prevented the development of any real synergy between central government and the municipalities. Economic resources were scarce, as was the interest of the communities, such that in 1900 the number of illiterates was 11,400,000 out of a total of 31,000,000 inhabitants. However, notwithstanding these difficulties and failures, initiatives were taken within some industries in north-central Italy to open schools for female workers, an emblematic instance of which was the Rossi wool mill of Schio, where 350 women attended elementary school classes.
Parishes, community centres, charities and mutual aid societies fostered education. From 1914 the number of schools for military recruits also grew, and schools for detainees were opened. In general, evening schools offered instruction on a greater variety of subjects and were more frequented than Sunday schools, although, as Vigo notes, toward the end of the nineteenth century they functioned more as complementary schools than as programmes to counter illiteracy. There were no precise rules anywhere for establishing lesson schedules; in rural communities farm work from spring to summer discouraged student attendance. In general, the provision of education exceeded demand; adults, both male and female, had little time for study on account of their work commitments. In chart 9.1 (p. 170) Vigo summarises the situation of adult schools in the major European countries between 1851 and 1906; comparing the number of enrolled students with the number of inhabitants of each country and the illiteracy rate, Italy was at the bottom of the list. This situation was explicitly reported by two British scholars, Bolton King and Thomas Okey, in their book Italy Today, published in Bari in Italian translation in 1902, and quoted by Vigo in his epilogue (p. 173). It was the law of 1870 on universal compulsory education that reversed this trend in the following years. The new generations born after 1876 were better educated. This does not mean that foreign observers failed to note the anomaly of Italian policies regarding education, which from 1860 to 1900 were entrusted to 33 ministers ‘each eager to distinguish himself by overturning the actions of his predecessor’ (p. 173).
The last pages of Vigo's book leave the reader with unanswered questions that the author attributes to a lack of qualitative sources on, for example, the type of trade or profession performed by the adults who attended evening or Sunday schools. Such information would make it possible to know whether a shopkeeper, a craftsman, a worker or a farmer benefited from knowing how to read, write and do sums in managing the profits of his labour, voting and defending his rights as a citizen.
Vigo's serious and lucid research succeeds in balancing statistical data with articles and reports on education published in the nineteenth century, as well as with the most recent literature on the subject. Once again the peculiarity of Italian history emerges from this book as a mosaic of varied experiences and policies, from north to south. Unification did not immediately lead to a uniform and general implementation of literacy. Government policies did not play the only prominent role; secular and Christian philanthropic initiatives also contributed and deserve due consideration, even into the twentieth century, in managing schools, colleges and institutes of all kinds and levels. Another aspect Vigo mentions, though in need of further analysis, is self-taught literacy, an aspect that escaped official ministerial inquiries but that may have featured in memoirs, chronicles or diaries, periodicals and local newspapers, letters and literary fiction.
