Goliardery and patriotic militancy: students’ associations in liberal age

di Catia Papa
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 25 (2007), p. 43

This passage gives a general outline about the main features of the Italian students’ associations at the beginning of the XX century. An analysis carried out at universities and secondary schools underlines a progressive projection from a local system into a national structure of these students’ communities with a consequent mixture between manners and practices of goliardery and patriotic militancy. It shows the different solutions adopted by the students’ organisations in order to establish their own social and generational frontiers, and to legitimate their elitist and executive inclinations. Moreover, it remarks the consequences of the adults’ strategies aimed to invest these students’ associations with responsibilities in a national contest, as the national-patriotic movements of the Giolitti age did.