A Escola de Milão e a formação de professores de alunos com Deficiência Intelectual. Instituição fundada pelo padre Agostino Gemelli conciliava medicina, psicologia e pedagogia, antes da inclusão escolar na Itália

The research reconstructs the history of the “School for the special aids and assistants for disabled children”, opened in 1926 at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan by father Agostino Gemelli, the founder and first influential rector. The evolution of the School, one of the very first in Italy of this kind, allows to investigate the changes occurred in the training of “special” teachers from the Twenties to the Seventies of the last Century, linked to the gradual process of inclusion of disabled children in common classes. Consequently, its experience represents an important part of the more general national path toward scholastic inclusion for disabled persons. The School also gives evidence of Gemelli’s work in the special education field. The interest of father Gemelli, one of the most famous Italian psychologists during the Twentieth Century, towards disability reflects the attention of the contemporary Catholic world to the education and care of the weakest people, based on scientific and methodical studies. Indeed, the “special” teachers of Gemelli’s School had to gain medical, psychological and pedagogical competences. The research contributes to fill a gap in the Italian studies in the field of the history of special education, a subject that only recently has attracted scholarly attention. It is carried out through archival investigations (5 archives investigated, 350 letters analyzed, 300,000 data collected), with the purpose of shedding light on teachers, users, materials and textbooks of the School, since its origin until the Seventies.