L’Università per stranieri di Perugia. Storia di un ateneo aperto al mondo

With this volume, the University for Foreigners of Perugia celebrates a ‘centenary’ that weaves together several of its founding moments: the high culture courses inaugurated in 1921 and the Italian language courses that started the following year; the first embryo of what would eventually be known as (through two royal decrees of 1925 and 1926) the Royal Italian University for Foreigners. This complex origin has stimulated a wide-ranging reflection regarding the history and peculiar role of the university in the Italian reality of those years, primarily about its relationship with the fascist regime. Going beyond apologetic or acquittal interpretations, numerous contributions in the volume are dedicated to precisely defining how much and in what manner the University was organic to the fascist project of exaltation of Italianness in a nationalistic key and how autonomous it remained from it. This analysis also allows us to grasp the importance, after the liberation of Perugia in June 1944, of the regency of the anti-fascist Aldo Capitini, who made the prestigious institution a vehicle for global advancement in the name of an open type of Italianness freed from nationalist rhetoric. It is perhaps no coincidence that in 1948 the rector Carlo Sforza, the Foreign Minister of the time, gave the famous speech How to make Europe? in this very University, a forerunner to the dream of a united Europe, almost as if to invest the institution with a new role in the name of collaboration between peoples.The volume’s section dedicated to the relationship between the University and Maria Montessori also bears witness to this precious institutional mission.