Educational gymnastics after unification

By Casati's Law, primary school male teachers were able to attend special training courses, from 1861 onwards. These courses were held by the new teacher training School of Gymnastics - directed by Obermann - and taken in the gymnasiums of the first Italian Gymnastics Society of Turin.

Statistics show that, in the school year 1863-1864, there were 17,923 male pupils, but only 57 female students, involved in gymnastic classes in 255 Italian schools.¹⁸ It should be added that among those schools only 41 had gymnasia and equipment, and most teachers were self-styled, having been soldiers, professio nal acrobats, dancers and horsemen. In particular, the wide lack of female pupils can be explained by the common creed that gymnastics was somehow a dangerous discipline for women's health and modesty, especially when teachers were men.

Finally, from 1867 onwards, the Ministry of Education decided that specific female teachers courses were to be organised in the School of Gymnastics at Turin, to prepare teachers devoted to female students. In the meantime, provincial, administrative and school authorities of the newly-established Kingdom of Italy were urged by the government to encourage the diffusion of educational gymnastics for both sexes in primary schools across the country.

The region of Venetia, which was annexed to Italy in 1866, was particularly favourable to female gymnastics. In fact, before its reunion to the Fatherland, the Venetian population had been under the Austrians for long, learning from them the habit of practising gymnastics in Fröbel's

kindergartens. In the region of Venetia, Pietro Gallo started a course for 48 primary school female teachers in 1868, and in the following year 466 girls could practice educational gymnastics at school.¹⁹ Statistics of 1872 report that in the city of Venice, out of 6,939 pupils attending gymnastics, 2,561 were girls.²⁰

In the 1870s, also in the cities of Bologna, Genoa, Padua and Verona, female gymnastics classes were successfully experimented in primary schools.

In 1872, 51,012 male and 16,285 female pupils practised gymnastics in Italy, that is, in only 8 years girls had increased three hundred times, but their distribution in the country was unequal. In 70 provinces, only 48 had female gymnastics classes in their schools, and the majority of them were concentrated at Turin, Milan, Venice, Verona and Naples.

In the school year 1874-75, the so-called Normal Gymnastics School for teachers of secondary school was opened within the already mentioned Gymnastics Society of Turin. Later, in 1877, Dr. Emilio Baumann founded a new teacher training school within the Virtus Society of Gymnastics, to help that of Turin in order to train gymnastics teachers of both sexes.

Baumann strongly supported his project by affirming that only 249 female teachers had gained the gymnastics degree in the last three years, in Turin, and among them 183 were already teaching in that area, whereas in Bologna there was nobody. He obtained support from the municipality for his school by adding that "female teachers especially could find a new job and start a brilliant career."²¹

Baumann's rational gymnastics was inspired both by the military Obermann's and the scientific Ling's methodologies, but it was adapted to Italian basic needs and scarce resources. Baumann was against 'artificial exercises' - such as those executed by means of the gymnastics equipment prescribed both by Obermann and Ling - whereas he was in favour of 'natural exercises', like walking, marching, climbing, jumping, and so on.

They had to prepare people to undergo any difficulty in social life and at work, by strengthening body and will.

Baumann's method found it difficult to be applied in Italy. In fact, looking at the data collected in 1884, which reported that on the whole only 24 Italian cities and towns had gymnasia, and only 11 outdoor gymnasia,²² one

deduces that those pupils attending the School of Bologna, once having become teachers could not apply much of Baumann's 'natural exercises', as there was a great lack of gymnasia and open spaces in the schools of the time. Most of them could only train children within classrooms by means of the poor 'gymnastics in the midst of school benches', proposed by Baumann as well.

Other physical education innovators, such as Pietro Gallo and Costantino Reyer Castagna, strongly co-operated in organising Baumann's School of Bologna, which was considered modern in comparison with that of Turin.

By the end of the 1870s, the Minister of Education, Francesco De Sanctis, won his battle against the still lasting prejudices against gymnastics at school - and especially female gymnastics - within Parliament, using both his moral power and his cultural weight. De Sanctis's action was inspired by the most advanced nations, such as England, Germany and Switzerland, where gymnastics was considered a fundamental way of education and physical and moral regeneration of the youth.

After the previous Casati's Law of 1859 which had not been applied widely in the territory, educational gymnastics again entered into the school as a compulsory discipline by De Sanctis's Law of 1878. In Article 3 it stated:

"In female schools of every order, gymnastics will have an exclusively educational character and will be regulated by special rules"²³

To provide for the lack of qualified gymnastics teachers, from 1879 to 1882 the government launched a wide campaign to bring primary and secondary school teachers up to date throughout the country. In 1879, the biannual Schools organised in 9 Italian cities opened to a certain number of teachers.

There is evidence that in the first year of the course 364 teachers attended those 9 Schools. In addition, about 933 intensive courses took place in different Italian provinces, and among them, 416 courses were attended by women.

Naturally common people, and even school authorities, did not totally agree and did not always operate according to De Sanctis's Law, as in those years the female programmes of educational gymnastics were inspired by the School of Turin, and therefore appeared as a bad copy of the male ones, i.

e. stiff movements executed also by means of German gymnastic

equipment, and soldierly exercises, really far from the current image of womanly softness and grace.

As an example, in 1879 the provincial Director of Education of Florence, a certain Cammarota, shared "the disgust that 25, 30 and 35 year old women participated in jumping, turning around, and so on",²⁴ and a number of female teachers successfully asked for exemption from teaching gymnastics at school, because of public opinion and the press.

Reluctance to train young girls in gymnastics, mainly due to the prevailing romantic model of weak women of that time, did not help the optimistic plan of giving all Italian women energy and health through physical education. Almost all girls hid dirty hair and face under a thick layer of powder, and their gymnastics teachers had also the task of teaching elementary norms of hygiene. As an example, it was reported that in 1871, of 600 young girls practising gymnastics at school, 550 used powder.²⁵ The recruitment of teachers was fragmentary and inadequate, so much so that in 1886, there were only 756 female gymnastics teachers owning a qualified degree in Italy.²⁶ On the other hand, judging from the complaints which were gathered by the sports press, these teachers achieved deeds of real heroism and self-denial, because they gained only 'starvation wages' by teaching in government schools. In a letter published in the specialist magazine Il Ginnasiarca, a young teacher compared the poor salary she received - 46.70 Lire a month - to that given by the municipality to other teachers for the same engagement, that is "net 600 Lire, besides accommodation and firewood".²⁷