Between School Memory and Historical-Educational Heritage: the Library of the "Giacomo Leopardi" National Boarding School in Macerata

School libraries, long confused with popular libraries, are part of the cultural heritage of a country and represent repositories of school memories that are still little known and valued. Yet, together with the school archives, they offer precious opportunities to explore the educational canons applied within actual school realities and to deepen the application of national pedagogical paradigms and their evolution over time in specific educational contexts. This contribution intends to explore the dual interpretative value of the school library both as a “cultural asset” to be known and safeguarded, and as a “place of memory” to be interrogated in relation to the implications connected with school life, focusing on the analysis of the “Giacomo Leopardi” boarding school library of Macerata. Founded in May 1915, the school library in question is of a considerable size (over 2.000 items) and is valuable one of its kind not only because it comes from a prestigious school with a long tradition that arose in the immediate post-unification period, but also because it has not been dismembered, and therefore allows you to travel through different historical periods. In this study, this school library is investigated taking into account various elements: title (to appreciate the composition of the library with respect to the literary genres represented); author (to evaluate the classic authors, of manuals, of best sellers of children’s literature present); typographical data (to detect the chronological location and the most present publishers); extra-textual elements (to explore the different forms of interaction between reader and text). The qualitative analysis will be combined with the quantitative one (expressed in percentage terms), in order to highlight the peculiarities of a case study that appears representative of the enormous heuristic potential of school libraries, both as sources for school memory and as an expression of a historical-educational heritage worthy of being protected and valued.