Un piccolo essere perverso. Il bambino nella cultura scientifica italiana fra Otto e Novecento

"Perverse Little Tiny Tots." Children in Italian scientific culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The so called discovery of childhood that science produced at the end of XIX century remains a historiographical challenge. What kind of discovery could it have been, given that children have always been around? This article consideres how scientific knowledge about children transformed ancient institutions, produced new specialties and new service professions, and moved the attention from children and their families’ needs to rights. The history of the Italian modernization of childhood shows that this transformation was not the result of fascism, which has been much discussed, but the result of the liberalism of the era. Italian scientists at the time, such as Lombroso and Mantegazza, claimed that there was no such thing as an innocent child. Not only the Church but Rousseau as well were completely wrong, they claimed. A healthy, normal child was more like a little devil than an angel. How could such a child, who is neither innocent nor guilty, turn into a moral and responsable adult rather than a delinquent? The scientific study of children and of their development confounded the traditional dualism between normal and abnormal, and shifted the focus to the dangers and risks of growing up.