Gyms and classrooms as sites of bodily education in Italian elementary schools in the second half of the 19th century

Throughout the process whereby Gymnastics was instituted as a curricular subject in Italian elementary schools over the second half of the 19th century, the places where it could be taught were gyms and, above all, classrooms. The sources used for this research shed light not only on the physical features of the spaces devoted to bodily education, but also and especially on the metaphorical meanings underpinning them and therefore on the pedagogical valence of physical education, the corporal experience of pupils, the construction of gender and also the ideological and educational nature of the spatial transformations.