Childhood and assistance: a work in progress European project

The Institute for History Researches in Vicenza has widened its field of work which, until that moment, it was “the other” Europe. The institute is undertaking a research project on abandoned childhood between East and West”. This project, which involves, until now, Italy, Ukraine and Romania, was born from the idea that social services for underage in the past had important similarities: from these observations is possible to deduce that the phenomenon was not only a peculiarity of the Western word, but it was spread all over Europe. The hypothesis of work is to put in comparison the different realities, realizing a useful operation for the general historical comprehension. Nowadays, the possibility of a comparison among different areas represents indeed the opportunity to rebuild the long-term circulation of ideas existing in the first years of the 20th century, as it is demonstrated by the multiplying of the international congresses on charity and childhood from the last years of the 19th century. Having a look to the past, the comparison enables to understand how these similarities have been growing slowly, through which channels and exchanges, how much they were truthful and how much they were simulated and how much, indeed, after the October revolution, the two parties of Europe were keeping similar customs. In this perspective, the project aims to open a construction site of research to go in depth with the comparison, giving relevance, in this phase, after some initial considerations, to a couple of specific and at the same time wide themes. The first one is the exchange of concepts and practices from one point of Europe to the other. The paths of these exchanges have to be traced period by period, identifying different levels: the one carried over by books, by treatises, by mails etc, and the one carried over by people –kings, high prelates, intellectuals, officials, travellers and so on- as well. The second theme analysed in the research, suggested by several studies conducted on social services realities in Italy, is born observing that institutes for underage were at the centre of a complex net of social, economic and political relationships with the territory. The reconstruction of this net and its evolution over the centuries enables to better understand the origin of the great variety of solutions adopted at the local level. Different and variable were the beneficiaries, different and variable were the welcoming habits and the organization of the social services, as well as there were different and variable perspectives of social re-integration, which had to conform, for example, to the productive transformations and the government projects. The idea supporting the research is to build a geographic history that helps to understand if and how the “models” preferred from time to time were consistent with the economic and social context in which the institutes were re-integrating their attendees, after having welcomed them. The scientific committee of the project is, at present time, composed by: Francesca Lomastro, from the Institute for history researches of Vicenza, Italy; Ioan Aurel Pop, from Cluj-Napoca University, Romania; Flores Reggiani, from the University of the Studies of Milan, Italy; Yuriy Shapoval, from the Sciences Academia of Kiev, Ukraine.