Montessori's 150th Birthday Celebrations

August 31, 2020 - Come to Chiaravalle, where she was born, so you can (virtually) join the celebrations. I will be launching this new blog over her birthday weekend with updates and reports from her hometown. Many people had planned on attending but will not be able to travel to Italy. You can join Montessori For Life for a virtual voyage to the town where she was born on her 150th birthday!

It was the year 1870, the same year Italy became a unified State.  Maria Montessori's mother went into labor and was attended at home by a midwife and a few other women, according to her father's memoir, and "despite being a long and difficult labor, the newborn seemed robust and healthy." This memoir is part of the AMI archival collection. I found this quote about her birth in the biography written by Grazia Honegger Fresco.

The house where she lived for her first few years is now a museum with collections of her early editions of her books and a historic photo collection. And as it is under renovation, we are excited to see the transformation. 

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1936 edition of 
the Child in the Family

Chapter 2 - The Newborn
"... who experiences a more sudden and radical change in environment than the child who is born? And what kind of care has civilization created to help the newborn … this person who must undergo the most difficult adaptation, who passes suddenly from one existence to another, in being born? ...  experience has revealed a terrible truth: we carry the wrongs of early infancy with us for the rest of our lives. The life of the embryo and the vicissitudes of childhood are decisive - for the health of the adult ... for the future of the human species."