«Secondo i naturali confini della libertà degli insegnanti». Forme di censura e controllo nell'esperienza della seconda Commissione centrale per l'esame dei libri di testo (1894-1901)

From its establishment in 1894, the Central Commission on textbooks sought to align Italian schoolbooks with appropriate national standards which were concerned with a vast range of issues: limiting the spread of publishers’ speculations, setting higher quality levels and promoting a specific range of national values among pupils. Such institution may be considered as one of the first attempt to impose a centralized control over textbooks market, stronger than even before and based on a specific kind of censorship. By leaving a persistent memory of itself in the following decades, the experience of the Central Commissions inspired the new Fascist system of control over textbooks in 1923. In the first part, this article aims to explore the origins of the Central Commission in the Italian institutional history. In the second part it will focus on some unpublished archival materials, such as publishers’ appeals against the Commissions’ decisions, addressed to the Consiglio Superiore della Pubblica Istruzione, an institution which worked as a kind of ‘appeal court’ during this period. These documents highlight how the entire system ran, which mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion have been set and which kind of censorship had been engaged. Dealing with the life of the Central Commission in Liberal Italy means exploring a multidimensional issue, which interacts with the history of education and the development of publishing in Liberal Italy, as well as with the relationship between the State control and the freedom of teaching.