Alessio Ponzio . La Palestra del littorio: L'Accademia della Farnesina; un esperimento di pedagogia totalitaria nell'Italia fascista . (Temi di storia.) Milan : FrancoAngeli . 2009 . Pp. 273. €32.00.

Abstract

This book traces the history of Accademia della Farnesina, which the Italian fascist regime charged with training and educating future teachers of physical education, and it argues that the Accademia was more than a center for schooling. It also aimed at training fascist youth leaders and more consequentially at transforming young Italians into perfect embodiments of the regime. The author's overall goal is to demonstrate fascism's totalitarian nature by looking at its educational work through the prism of the Accademia. Alessio Ponzio argues that the history of the Accademia reveals the regime's struggle to identify pedagogical models and ideals that would fulfill its totalitarian project. The Accademia represented a site in which fascism enacted its intent to both reinvent Italian politics and remake the Italians through an “anthropological revolution.” With a thorough and detailed analysis of archival documents and journals of the time, the author begins his account by contextualizing the Accademia within the broader history of physical education in post-unification Italy. We thus learn that already in 1861 the idea of physical education as a tool for the formation of Italian citizens emerged and led to the introduction of physical education in schools. The field of physical education, however, remained quite dysfunctional in liberal Italy, and once fascism came to power the government reorganized the teaching with the goal of creating new Italians. In 1927 the fascist youth organization Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) was charged with the task of providing physical education to all students in elementary and middle schools. Eventually, the growing need for trained teachers who could perform the tasks envisioned by the regime required new pedagogic means and structures. The Accademia della Farnesina was founded with this intent and soon became a political tool for the regime to train leaders for the fascist youth organization.