A nation and its faith: the Risorgimento process in the textbooks of Niccolò Rodolico (1922-1941)

Abstract

This essay offers a reconstruction of the scholastic production for Italian high schools by the well-known historian Rodolico during the ‘ventennio’. It discusses that he was one of the main voices of post-unification Italian nationalism and therefore easily assimilated to the fascist scholastic production. A careful analysis, in particular, about the Historical Summary –wich was continuously published from 1923 to 1967- shows that more than a kind of late-liberal nationalism in Rodolico’s manuals there is a Catholic populist nationalism: this Catholic nationalism wich strengthened during the fascist period also in parallel with a series of transformations that the same contemporary Catholicism was experiencing.