San Lorenzo: Where Maria Montessori Got Her Start

One of the surprises of the San Lorenzo neighborhood we inhabited this year is its discrete harboring of the birthplace of Maria Montessori's Casa dei bambini ("Children's house"), where she developed and put in practice her early childhood educational theories.

At right, the brightly polished brass door marker for Maria Montessori's first casa dei bambini.

San Lorenzo is an appropriate locale for Montessori's then-experimentation because it was one of the poorest and most degraded areas of Rome, home--at the turn of the last century--to the crowded and woefully underserved Italian working class. As we have noted in other posts, San Lorenzo, sometimes called the "most Roman of neighborhoods" outside the Roman walls, is almost an urban island, hemmed in by an enormous cemetery (Verano), multiple-track trainyards, and those ancient Roman walls. The end of the 19th century saw a building boom in Rome, but it was a boom insufficient to house the thousands of workers pouring into the city from the countryside. There was "deep social distress," explains one of the placards on the walls of the still-standing building that housed Montessori's first casa, resulting from illegal crowding and poverty. 

Left, the unassuming building at via dei Marsi 58, in San Lorenzo, where in 1907 the first casa moderna was built (there would be more than 400 within a couple years), part of an attempt to clear slums and provide "socialization." Today, not even this historical building is free from tags and other graffiti that mark the San Lorenzo area.

A senator and engineer, Edoardo Talamo, was put in charge of the new Istituto Romano dei Beni Stabili (The Roman Institute for Public Buildings might be a decent translation), established in 1904 to produce new buildings, case moderne ("modern houses"). And this unassuming building, at via dei Marsi 58, in San Lorenzo, was one of the first, with plans for it made as early as 1905. Talamo and his colleagues at the Institute wanted more than providing "a roof over the head of the neediest," as one description of the "modern houses" read. Jane Addams-like, they wanted "a social transformation of the inhabitants" through "common spaces with various advantages and facilities in each building." The children's space was a kind of early day-care for working parents (such as I attended in Seattle during the World War II years), with mothers helping to implement the plan. 

Right, an interior wall, with the first casa labeled, now with Maria Montessori's name.

In the early 1900s (after receiving multiple degrees that were highly unusual for women, including a medical doctorate), Montessori was a professor of pedagogy at Rome's La Sapienza university, working on her theories. Talamo engaged her to develop the "children's houses" within the "modern houses." She credits him with "the brilliant idea" (maybe the brilliant idea was hiring her) "of welcoming tenants--young children between 3 and 7--to gather in one room under the direction of a teacher who would live in the same building. Each building would have its own school." The Institute by 1907 owned more than 400 buildings in Rome, and so the project had great potential for development, an ideal incubator for the innovative Montessori.

The courtyard, left, where the children tended their own vegetable garden, one of the Montessori educational tasks. One of our friends recalls attending a Montessori school in the 1950s, but he didn't recall the place, only that "I barfed in the courtyard."

That first casa dei bambini is still there, almost 120 years later, in the building on via dei Marsi. It was turned over to the city of Rome in 1938, operated through World War II (the Fascists no doubt salivated over this ready-made educational plant), then was completely abandoned. It was reopened in 1966 by Associazione opera Montessori (Association of Montessori work). Under various organizations, the basic educational structure, with several schools, continues to this day. The casa dei bambini in San Lorenzo remains as a kind of in-place Montessori museum, that, along with the educational institution, "preserves the initial spirit and methodological tradition theorized" by her.

Dianne

Educational panels in Italian and English inside the building complex explain the casa, Montessori's role, and the specific layout.

Right, the memorial plaque from 2007, commemorating the centennial of the casa. It says (as I would translate it) it's the centenary of her birth, but it isn't. It's the centenary of the birth of her educational system. The plaque loftily states: "here, the first casa dei bambini was created January 6, 1907, initiating the rich and productive work of the great educator in service to infancy for the freedom of man."

At the University of Rome: Protesting the War in Gaza, May/June 2024

This spring, while living in two locations near the main campus of Rome's largest university--La Sapienza--we naturally were interested in exploring the role of the university, and especially its students, in engaging the conflict in Gaza. We made three purposeful excursions onto the campus. We had heard that a group of students were protesting Israel’s incursion into Gaza and "occupying" a portion of the campus. But (we're embarrassed to say), on our first trip to the campus we failed to find any evidence of a student occupation. There was evidence of a protest movement in the writing on some of the university's walls, and some posters, but no tents, or so we thought. 

At left, a pro-Palestinian phrase suggesting that 
Palestine should encompass all of what is now Israel. 
At right, "In Gaza there are no universities." 

All Eyes on Rafah (a city in southern Gaza, under siege)

The war has its origins here. Boycott!

One poster notified students of an upcoming student demonstration in Piazza Vittorio against the government of Giorgia Meloni, and including solidarity with Palestine:

A "Free Palestine" poster advocated shutting down Sapienza ("Blocchiamo Sapienza"), which these students understood to be complicit in the conflict:

In most respects, the campus seemed normal, undisturbed by the war in Gaza.

In this area of the campus, more centrally located and prominent than the site
occupied by the protesters, everything seemed normal. 

The second trip a couple of weeks later proved more fruitful. Rather than search the campus once again, we asked a maintenance worker if he knew of an occupation and, if so, where it might be. He pointed to a road leading to the back of the campus, behind the main piazza. And there it was, tucked in an area that was a few feet below ground--below the rest of the campus. About 30 pop-up tents. An information table. And, gathered around a picnic-type table nearby, a half dozen students--maybe planning something (or maybe not). 

The encampment was accompanied by kite-like stanchions, featuring slogans in script. The general theme seemed to be, "while you're eating a nice lunch, the folks in Gaza are starving."  

On the standard at left, the Palestinian flag and the word "Nakba," which means "catastrophe" in Arabic and refers to the dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The protesters apparently had WiFi. 

We also took more careful note of the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian wall writing, this time looking for evidence of the students dislike of the way the Rector--Antonella Polimeni, a physician--was handling the issue. Although neither the wall writings nor the posters explicitly mention it, a key issue for the students was the university's participation in "il bando Maeci"--an agreement that institutionalized cooperation in science and research between Israel and Italy. 

Some sort of student march to protest the situation in Gaza took place off campus in the week that followed this second visit. We did not attend. But we did return to the campus to chronicle any changes. What we found was surprising: all that remained of the campus occupation were spots and indentations in the grass where the tents had been. 

We later read that the University may have driven the students out by scheduling "repair" work for that area; we had seen some of that nearby when the tents were there and wondered if the construction project wasn't a kind of harassment. We also read that the students had apparently decided to end the 6-week occupation voluntarily. A spokesperson for the students told Il Messaggero (a Rome daily newspaper) that the occupation had not, indeed, changed university policy, but that the students had learned that a change in tactics was necessary, one that featured increased contact and involvement with faculty and university departments, perhaps leading to a boycott. The students also looked forward to a protest on the 24th of June, on the occasion of a meeting of the university's academic senate.  

Bill 

Following Fermi: The Great Physicist in Rome

Traces of Enrico Fermi, one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, are visible in Rome, the city of his birth and where he was driven out by Fascism.

Fermi, an acknowledged prodigy in math and science, started his work on a street now more known for its night-life, via Panisperna in the Monti quarter. He and his associates were dubbed "I ragazzi di via Panisperna," - "the boys of via Panisperna," and are captured in the photo below:

Enrico Fermi at far right. The

other "ragazzi" 

from left to right, Oscar D'Agostino,

Emilio Segrè, Edoardo Amaldi,

and Franco Rasetti. The photo

 was taken by a sixth, Bruno Pontecorvo.

The background looks very much

like the buildings on via Panisperna

today, though #90, where the institute

supposedly was, is an older church.

As a result, we are not sure exactly where on 

via Panisperna the institute was located.

Fermi's location beginning in 1935 is well-known, and now bears his name, as well as sporting a plaque commemorating his extraordinary research there. And that's in the main campus of Rome's storied university, La Sapienza, or La Città Universitaria, designed by Mario Piacentini and opened in 1935 (the subject of prior posts, including one on Gio Ponti's math building and another on Mario Sironi's "Aula Magna" mural - Great Hall - painted in 1935).

In May 2018 we joined a guided tour of the University's physics department, located in one of Piacentini's original set of buildings. 

Left, the Department of Physics is named for Fermi.

The Physics Institute itself is named for another Nobel-winning Italian physicist (and member of the Fascist Party, as was Fermi at one point), Guglielmo Marconi, as seen here:

The plaque below - inside the building - reads:

"In this institute from 1927 to 1938 Enrico Fermi taught and studied. Here he investigated the structure of materials and discovered the radioactivity caused by neutrons [actually neutrinos], opening new avenues in the world. To the knowledge and power of man." [As noted, the institute was located on via Panisperna until about 1935.]

What the plaque does not say is that in 1938, when Fermi, age 37, went to Stockholm to accept his Nobel prize in physics, he kept going - to the United States, fleeing with his family from the racial laws of Italy that had already affected the lives of many of his colleagues and potentially would affect his wife, who was of Jewish heritage.

The tour included parts of Fermi's lab (left), and a cabinet of Fermi tools and books (below, right).

Besides the photo of i ragazzi di via Panisperna, other photos on display on the tour included the one below of Fermi with two other giants of theoretical physics, Werner Heisenberg and another Italian, Wolfgang Pauli (below, the German Heisenberg in the center, Pauli on the right), at Lake Como (date unclear).

The Nobel Prize website has a good biography of Fermi and lay-person descriptions of his scientific breakthroughs (at least one of which was developed based on Pauli's research).

Dianne