Biography

Grazia Fresco was born on 6 January 1929 in Via del Pellegrino, in central Rome. She was the daughter of Adele Petri and Francesco Fresco, both primary-school teachers, and the eldest of four sisters: Carmela, Vittoria and Valeria.

Her father, Francesco (1894-1974), was originally from Nuoro, a town in Sardinia. He moved to Rome after the First World War, during which he had served as a lieutenant and fought in battles along the Isonzo River in 1917. In Rome, he began working at an open-air school on Janiculum Hill, where he met Fausta Petri, whose sister Adele he married in 1928.

The school, supported by Rome’s mayor, [Ernesto] Nathan, was intended for children with tuberculosis. There were wooden huts for rainy days, one of which may still be standing today, but the children stayed outdoors whenever possible. They had lightweight tables and chairs that could easily be moved.

After the war, Francesco obtained the qualification to teach at vocational schools and taught at the Istituto di orologeria Pacinotti, a school for watchmakers. Reserved by nature, he maintained a lifelong interest in the philosophy and teaching of mathematics and geometry and wrote several textbooks on these subjects for school use.

Adele Petri (1898-1994), Grazia’s mother, was abandoned by her father. When her mother died some time later, her siblings, Fausta and Achille, placed her in the boarding school of the orphanage on Via Ripetta in central Rome. Run by the Dorothean Sisters, the institution was named after Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca, an Italian poet and revolutionary of the Napoleonic era. Adele stayed there until the age of 18, attending the orphanage’s school alongside middle-class girls from the city centre. It was there that she met Adele Costa Gnocchi, one of her teachers, and her classmate Adele Morghen. With Morghen, she began attending the Koinonia, a religious discussion group associated with Ernesto Bonaiuti. A modernist priest, Bonaiuti had been suspended a divinis (barred by the Church from exercising his priestly ministry). He was also one of the 12 university professors who refused to pledge allegiance to the Fascist regime in 1931.

[Adele] spoke of [Bonaiuti] as a nonconformist: a good priest. The Koinonia was an eye-opening experience for her. Besides her and Adele Morghen, the group included Maria Fermi [sister of renowned physicist Enrico Fermi], Maria Re (later Gancikoff), Adele Jemolo, Raffaello Morghen and others. They met on Sundays taking turns hosting the group in their homes, to read the Bible from both a spiritual and a historical perspective.

Adele was drawn to working with children who were then described as ‘oligophrenic’, a historical term for children with intellectual disabilities. She trained in this field by taking courses with Giuseppe Montesano (Maria Montessori’s partner and the father of her son, Mario Montessori Senior) at the Scuola Magistrale Ortofrenica, a specialist teacher-training school, and worked with children with disabilities for the rest of her life.

My mother always made her own learning materials for her pupils. I remember her putting together little packs of objects and cards to help them develop their reading skills. She followed the ideas of Montesano and Montessori: always start with something concrete. While Montessori increasingly focused on typically developing children, Montesano continued working with children with disabilities. His work later fed into that of the psychiatrist Giovanni Bollea, who had been one of his students.

Grazia spent her childhood and teenage years on Via Giulia, a short distance from the Liceo Virgilio, a classical secondary school inaugurated by Mussolini around that time. Their top-floor apartment had a long balcony overlooking the Tiber River and facing Janiculum Hill. Despite financial hardship, the family was intellectually curious and had an open, non-parochial religious outlook. Although politics was not discussed openly, different views coexisted at home, not always easily: Francesco’s socialism, Adele’s religious beliefs, and the communism of Adele’s sister Fausta.

Aunt Fausta lived in a small flat on the same landing as us. She had become a Communist in 1921; the Fascist regime forbade her from teaching after a house search turned up what they called “socialist ink”: a copy of Jack London’s The Iron Heel. She lost her teaching job and had to find a new way to make a living: as a knitter.

Grazia soon proved to be a brilliant student. Curious by nature, she learned the basics of botany from her father, with whom she shared a particularly close bond, and accompanied him on walks during the long summer holidays in San Martino al Cimino (northwest of Rome), where the family spent their holidays. In June 1947, she completed her classical secondary education; that September, she obtained her teaching qualification, allowing her to begin work straight away. She had already been contributing to the family income by giving private lessons. In 1953, she enrolled at the Faculty of Biology at the University of Rome but left shortly before graduating to devote herself full-time to the study of children and the newborn child in particular. Throughout her life, she retained a particular interest in ethology - the study of animal behaviour - and in caring for the biosphere. She saw these interests reflected in Montessori’s concept of ‘cosmic education’, and they became fundamental to her deeply secular, diversity-sensitive approach to education.

Grazia first encountered the Montessori method as a child. From 1933, she attended the Casa dei Bambini (Children’s Home) at Via Angelico 22, which was attached to the Regia Scuola di Metodo (Royal School of Method), a teacher-training institution for the Montessori method. In 1947, having recently qualified as a teacher, she was invited by Adele Costa Gnocchi to join the first experimental class of the new Montessori School for Early Childhood Assistants (AIM), which Costa Gnocchi had founded.

During these years, Grazia observed and studied newborns in the maternity ward at San Camillo Hospital and at the Rome Provincial Foundling Home, an institution for infants without parental care. These experiences shaped her emerging pedagogical thinking, with a focus on pregnancy, birth, the mother-child relationship and adult education. Her careful observations of labour, birth and the first moments of life anticipated by about 20 years the later interest in ‘non-violent birth’ - a gentler, less traumatic approach to childbirth - which became widely known through the work of F. Leboyer and M. Odent.

Grazia met Maria Montessori in 1949, when she attended the Montessori Conference in San Remo and in 1951 attended the last course Montessori taught in Rome. Around the same time, she began working with Adele Costa Gnocchi at the Children’s Home in Palazzo Taverna, known as La Scuoletta (‘the little school’). From 1952, she assisted Giuliana Sorge on her Montessori courses. Years later, she inherited Sorge’s archive, now held by the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) in Amsterdam.

In 1953 Grazia began a long career promoting new educational ideas through her writing, starting with the magazine Vita dell’infanzia, published by Opera Nazionale Montessori (ONM, the national Montessori organisation). She became pedagogical coordinator for the Montessori classes in Rome’s Tufello district and served on the ONM board and several commissions, before stepping down from these roles in the late 1980s.

Around Christmas 1953, Maria Fermi, a friend of Grazia’s mother, told her about a child who had starved to death in Sicily and of her wish to go there to see Danilo Dolci’s work at first hand. Grazia decided to accompany her, and together they travelled to a community of fishermen.

Life at sea was gruelling; people lived on a loaf of bread and a piece of herring. There were no doctors, there were open-air sewers, and the poverty was unimaginable.

Grazia’s collaboration with Dolci’s non-violent project began there and continued intermittently until 1957. Through it, she came to know, among others, Gigliola Venturi, Goffredo Fofi, Carlo Ravasini and Lanza del Vasto. She planned to open a small school in Trappeto, a town west of Palermo, and even had small tables and chairs delivered, but she was unable to realise the plan. In 1955, she took part in the hunger strike organised by Dolci, contributed to Inchiesta a Palermo (An Inquiry into Palermo, Dolci’s exposé of poverty, oppression, and Mafia influence in Sicily), and helped to publish a small book entitled Due pescatori raccontano la storia di Borgo di Dio. She began considering a permanent move to Trappeto.

Danilo used to put on concerts, with musicians coming from Palermo. I come from a family where we mainly listened to opera; it was in Trappeto that I discovered Bach, the St John Passion and the St Matthew Passion. After hours spent mending their nets, the fishermen would come up and sit down to listen with us. Since I couldn’t open a school, I began handling all the correspondence that came in. That was how I also met Emilio Honegger, whom I later married.

The Italian educational thinker Lamberto Borghi, then a lecturer at the University of Palermo, often travelled to Trappeto with his students. On one such visit, before Grazia decided whether to settle in the Sicilian town, he encouraged her to seek out other experiences.

Grazia began attending courses organised by CEMEA (a French-origin movement promoting participatory learning), starting with one at Badia di Montepiano near Florence. The courses helped shape her approach to adult education, which emphasised active participation and group work. At CEMEA, she met colleagues Margherita Fasolo, Marcello Trentanove, Gastone Tassinari, Lina Mannucci, Oscar Gitz and Liliana Basile. After becoming an instructor, she organised many courses with them, continuing until the mid-1980s.

Many years later, from 2003 to 2006, she worked with CEMEA in the Swiss canton of Ticino to train staff at nurseries and other early-childhood settings. Through practical placements, training and supervision, she helped initiate a profound process of change that continues today.

In the 1950s, Grazia alternated between stays in Trappeto and in France, where she deepened her understanding of CEMEA’s educational philosophy. She later resumed working with children in Rome, promoting the Montessori method through seminars and courses in different parts of Italy, and collecting material that she would use many years later to write a biography of Maria Montessori. Curious about the many productive initiatives taking shape across Italy, she met Margherita Zoebeli, who had founded the Italo-Swiss Educational Centre (CEIS) in Rimini, and joined the Civic Collaboration Movement. Through travel, training, practical placements and reading, her focus became increasingly clear: children, and a non-violent approach to education that respects each child’s aptitudes, pace, inclinations and interests.

In 1960, Grazia married Emilio Honegger (1922-2013), an Italian-Swiss man who had grown up in Bergamo. He supported her educational work throughout her life. Emilio also supported Danilo’s campaigns and knew the Montessori world well: his mother, Eleonora Caprotti Honegger, had trained as a teacher with Giuliana Sorge. Between 1949 and 1950, she opened a Montessori school in Bergamo and, about ten years later, helped establish the International Centre for Montessori Studies, which remains active today. Grazia moved to Castellanza, an industrial town north-west of Milan, where her husband managed the Cantoni textile mills.

The atmosphere in Castellanza was very different from Rome, and I wanted to do something for mothers and children. I wasn’t interested in playing the lady of the house or hosting social gatherings. The first thing I organised was a toy exhibition. Then, because my husband’s company had made a very large house available to us - and I had had two children by then - I decided to open a little school there. It was a lovely, spacious house, and dozens of children came. I ran the school from our home until some of my husband’s friends made another house available.

Step by step, we carried on, and after the Casa dei Bambini we also opened a primary school. I always regretted not teaching in the public school system, even though I was qualified to do so, but I wanted to run a Montessori school. Although it was private, the school was not just for wealthy families. The local council paid the fees for some children, while families of modest means sent their children because they needed full-day schooling at a time when it was not yet widely available. The parish priest was hostile, but the mayor, Giulio Moroni - a well-regarded member of Italy’s Christian Democratic Party - was not. Thanks to the school, I learnt to work closely with parents, as Adele Costa Gnocchi had done. I was always at the school entrance every morning.

Grazia ran the Castellanza Montessori School until 1988, when she left it altogether. During the 1970s, she also began working as an adult educator in northern Italy.

“In 1973, she taught at the School for Early Childhood Assistants at the Istituto Provinciale Infanzia di Varese [Provincial Institute for Children in Varese, north of Milan]. From then on, she set about transforming the institute, which cared for children aged 0-6 from families facing difficulties. This was an extraordinary undertaking that changed these children’s lives. It involved more than training and supervision: she always kept the institute and the children in mind. She was deeply empathetic, a good listener and very patient. She helped us discover the children’s abilities and potential while developing our powers of observation. Only later did she introduce major changes to the environment and the organisation of the daily routine. In the end, the change was radical, but she brought it about gradually and sensitively. It worked because it helped the children realise their potential. She made people feel safe because she was a caring presence, not just a professional one: she kept you in mind. From time to time she would be appalled and react strongly, but she was also prudent. Gradually, for many of us, she became an enduring presence in our lives.”

Thanks to Grazia’s exceptional ability to bring people together and promote ideas and actions that could significantly improve early-childhood education, a group formed around her. It included Paolo Ballabio, Carlo Alberti, Franca Russi and Mariuccia Poroli, who together later founded Percorsi per Crescere, a non-profit social cooperative. Its training, focused mainly on services for very young children, aimed to promote high-quality care centred on children’s abilities and needs by changing the way adults see, understand and interact with young children.

In 1994, Grazia and Percorsi per Crescere opened a children’s play space in Varese, which eventually grew into a Montessori nursery and primary school. From 2002 to 2010, she coordinated training and supervision for staff at all the nursery schools in Bergamo, working with local authorities, including to help open a new nursery. She also organised numerous conferences sponsored by the Province of Varese and the Lombardy Region, generously sharing her educational expertise with members of the cooperative, which remains active today.

Meanwhile, she maintained close ties with Rome and with the Centro Nascita Montessori (Montessori Birth Centre), founded by Adele Costa Gnocchi. Grazia became its president in 1983 and served until 2003, when she was named honorary president. Tirelessly exploring Maria Montessori’s life and thought, she travelled throughout Italy and also to Switzerland, France, Poland and the United States, organising training courses and giving lectures.

It was Adele Costa Gnocchi who encouraged Grazia to write. Writing gave her a way to share what was being discovered at the School for Early Childhood Assistants and to stay in close contact with her first teacher and the work she continued to do in Rome.

In 1967, the year Adele Costa Gnocchi died, Grazia published her first book with Giulia Gorresio, Questi nostri bambini. In 1970, she published the first edition of Neonato con amore, which was revised and republished numerous times, sometimes under a different title. She favoured simple, clear writing that everyone could understand. In this style she wrote for Ada Gobetti’s Giornale dei Genitori, to Vita dell’Infanzia and, over the years, Azione Non Violenta, La Terra Vista dalla Luna, Lo Straniero, Gli Asini and many others. In 1984, she founded Il Quaderno Montessori, which she co-edited with Lia de Pra Cavalleri until the summer of 2017, when its final issue (Number 133) was published.

Il Quaderno became the medium for sharing her educational philosophy. Although deeply rooted in the Montessori method, this philosophy was marked by openness and intellectual curiosity. She wrote in a deliberately simple style that kept theory and practice together. Alongside advice for parents and notes on teaching methods, she published reviews and historically important documents and introduced readers to the work of figures such as Emmi Pikler, Elinor Goldschmied, Janusz Korczak and others.

As well as articles, Grazia wrote numerous books on topics such as nursery care, sleep, parent-child relationships, becoming a grandparent, and newborn care - her foremost and constant concern. Through her extensive work as a public speaker, she spread Maria Montessori’s philosophy throughout Italy and beyond. She met hundreds of parents, educators and managers of educational services, building a network of people dedicated to children. In recognition of this work, UNICEF awarded her the Dalla parte dei bambini prize in 2008.

Energetic and generous right to the end, between 2019 and 2020 she edited the series Gioca e impara con il metodo Montessori (Play and Learn with the Montessori Method), published by the leading Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, while also publishing three new books with Solferino Editions.

From the late 1990s onwards, by which time she was seventy years old, Grazia embarked on a new path centred on the historical memory of which she was the custodian. In 2001, she published a biography of Adele Costa Gnocchi, drawing on interviews and the recollections of people who had known her, and examining her pioneering work with newborns and young children. Grazia reread Adele’s letters and reconstructed her life, thought and work in a book titled Radici nel futuro, published by La Meridiana.

In 2007, she published Maria Montessori: una storia attuale (Maria Montessori, a Relevant Story), which the AMI considers as the best biography of Dr Montessori currently in print. For Grazia, who had always worked directly with children as an educator and trainer, this was a different kind of project. She approached it with her customary tenacity and meticulous care, guided by what she called the ‘duty of remembrance’. She researched and checked the documentary evidence carefully, continuing to refine the work in later editions.

Always wary of a ‘ready-made’ or one-size-fits-all version of Montessori, Grazia combined biographical storytelling with Montessori’s teaching and the hope that education from birth can serve as an aid to life. Writing about her teachers was yet another way of writing about birth, about education, and the paradigmatic shift brought about by Maria Montessori - a revolution that remains relevant today but has yet to be fully realised. It calls for the child, rather than the adult, to become the driving force of education, and for the child’s capacity to shape their own development to be respected within a transformed living environment. It also overturns conventional ideas about relationships between parents and children, and between teachers and pupils. Perhaps, she opines, this offers a starting point for a less cruel world.