Educational care at Mompiano school and the Children’s Houses in Rome and Milan in the age of Giolitti

Abstract

In the modernization era, at the beginning of the twentieth-century, the preschool institutions’question became the core of the padagogic debate in the Italian society. A relevant contribution was given by the women’s emancipation process that brouhgt towards a modern concept of assistance, such as the overcoming of the idea of nursery schools only as places for safekeeping. It was underlined, in fact, their important educational function to childhood care. Exactly in that period, two educational experiences occurred, attracting politicians’ and pedagogists’ attention: the birth of Rosa Agazzi’s pre-school, expression of a mostly agricultural and peasant Italy, and the Maria Montessori’s “Casa dei bambini” (Children’s house), designed into an upgrading town planning scheme, in the degraded districts of Rome and Milan.