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."