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This paper sheds new light on the factors that fostered basic education in Italy between 1871 and 1911, while exploring how school efficiency–the capability to reach better educational outcomes given school inputs–evolved over time. We employ a new dataset on educational outcomes, school inputs, and socio-economic factors in the country’s 69 provinces at ten-year intervals. First, a historical aggregate Education Production Function is estimated for each province, allowing us to assess to what extent growing inputs provided by Italy’s public school system translated into increased literacy among school-age children (age 6 to 10) and youngsters (age 15 to 19)–and how much each input contributed to the overall output. We find that schooling was worth getting, as GERs and other inputs into primary schooling are always significantly correlated with literacy levels for both age groups. As a second step, we use Data Envelopment Analysis to estimate school-efficiency scores based on the relationship between school inputs and educational outputs. The efficiency scores obtained are used to investigate the role that non-discretionary inputs–ie demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic factors–played in determining school efficiency across the provinces of Italy in the late-19th century. Our results suggest that pre-unification school systems cast a long shadow on post-unification educational trends, but this historical legacy started to fade out at the turn of the 20th century–and even more when Italy started to slowly shift towards centralized primary education (1901–1911).