Latitudini, vertici e basi. Geografie e geometrie del 1944 nella "transizione" dell'università italiana

This chapter examines 1944 as a pivotal and geographically uneven phase in the transition of Italian universities from fascism to the post-war order. Drawing on archival records from the University of Pisa and the Scuola Normale Superiore, alongside published institutional sources and existing scholarship, it reconstructs the divergent experiences produced by military occupation, liberation, and competing political authorities. The analysis connects Allied policies of defascistisation and academic purges with antifascist initiatives, repression, and institutional survival under the Italian Social Republic. Moving between university leaderships and the experiences of students and non-academic staff, it explores how political choices, professional networks, displacement, and material destruction shaped academic life. Particular attention is paid to rectors’ self-exculpatory narratives, the selective application of purge procedures, and negotiations over resources and the territorial role of universities. The chapter argues that the changes initiated in 1944 combined reformist aspirations with practices of institutional self-preservation. The adaptation of inherited structures and the protection of established academic networks constrained renewal, while wartime disruption generated opportunities for reform, student support, and renewed engagement with local social and economic needs. Viewed across different geographical settings and temporal scales, the university transition emerges as a contested process in which continuity and rupture were closely interwoven. This perspective situates 1944 within the longer transformation of Italian higher education, identifying both the persistence of established hierarchies and the emergence of changes that would reshape universities in republican Italy.