O árduo caminho”: Memórias de um inspetor escolar italiano (Berengario Galileo Amorosa, 1865-1937) (Título original: “Il duro calle”. Le memorie di un ispettore scolastico italiano (Berengario Galileo Amorosa - 1865/1937)

This paper proposes a case study constituted by school memories published in 1912 by the Italian inspector Berengario Galileo Amorosa (intellectual, historian and scholar), with the objective of calling attention to the double opportunity that a similar kind of source offers to the research. On the one hand, the pages of Amorosa send us back to methodological reflections on the "versatility" of this historiographical source, poised between testimony and narrative, personal mark and public writing, of difficult definition, as suggested by Vinao Frago. On the other hand, they impel towards a more detailed reconstruction of the "history of the inspection function" in the Italian area, still largely to be written. At this point, the interest is directed to the literary text genre represented by the autobiographical memories of the inspectors, from which the text of Amorosa offers a significant example. Halfway between report and personal remembrance, the knowledge about the school world is restored from the memories and stories of a "special" observer: what emerges is a depiction of the school in the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, which, apart from recalling "the distress, the miseries and sorrows of the class of teachers", gives us information about the everyday school life, through representation of this manifold environment. The stories are entrusted to a recollection character and personal narrative that naturally cannot renounce the framework of collective experience that is placed in the background. In this sense, the work of Amorosa gains importance, which "faithfully reflects fourteen years of life dedicated to the elementary school in different countries and among different peoples”, along the "hard road" in the early decades of the twentieth century. Ultimately, his memoirs, as text genre, contribute in a very close way for the understanding of the major processes of educational change experienced by the Italian school life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Keywords: Scholar Inspector. History of the Inspection function. Italian School Life. Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.