Business
Dec 12, 2021
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151 years ago in Chiaravalle, Maria Montessori was born, whose method, famous all over the world, is still applied in schools of various countries today.
After a long restoration and redevelopment project, with C&C as the technological partner, her birthplace in the Marche region opens its doors. A place that, alongside the recounting of the human, cultural, and scientific experience of a leading figure of the 20th century, will be able to embrace the challenges of contemporary education.
For Maria Montessori, it is another return home, the one of then, now enhanced by a cultural program and a system of visual and expositive representation that celebrates the woman and, with her, the method for education as the free expansion of individuality. In that small apartment, on August 31, 1870, Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori was born, the only child of Alessandro Montessori, an inspector of the local Tobacco Factory, and Renilde Stoppani, from Monte San Vito in Marche, a member of a family of small landowners.
On the first floor of a lively and inhabited building – surrounded by shops, social places, and cultural institutions – four windows and five rooms, called by name, converse with the public space and become a house museum. The Map Room, the Method Room, Room 3.0 – multimedia storage and cultural enjoyment and production lab – the Reading Room and the Green Room.
The exhibition includes a few very symbolic heirlooms granted by the descendants, some finds that greatly resonate with the original family, and the image of the legendary glass-walled demonstration classroom, showcased at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, a true spectacle of education. The 1000-lire note could not be missing: after Giuseppe Verdi and Marco Polo, Maria Montessori will be the only woman in the history of the Italian Republic to have been graced with a banknote as a supreme acknowledgment of her genius and influence on her time. All around, images, texts, and videos unfold travel, studies, relations, encounters.
Just a few days before the official opening, Casa Montessori Chiaravalle received the medal from the President of the Republic.