In 1906 Montessori was, at thirty-six years, an established profession-
al, a scientist and academic of distinction, well known and highly regard-
ed by colleagues in her several fields of interest and by a wide circle of
Roman civic figures and social leaders. Toward the end of the year she
returned to Rome from Milan, where she had been invited to serve on
an awards committee at an international meeting on pedagogy and psy-
chology, and it was then that the opportunity came her way for which ev-
erything she had done till now seems like preparation.

Rome, like the entire country, was experiencing a new sense of possi-
bility.

The late 1890s had been a period of widespread social disorders,
brought on by economic distress. Crop failures had led to a rise in the
price of bread. There was rioting in Milan and workers struck in Rome,
protesting against the high cost of the government's colonial policy in
Africa and the vast fortunes made by speculators while peasants died of
hunger and children labored in factories. The ministry of education at
Bologna was mobbed by students and at the University of Rome soldiers
were posted in the lecture rooms. In the spring of 1898 the university
was closed down and the city itself was in a state of siege for several days.
Widespread repressive measures were taken by the government against
protesting groups of Catholics and peasants, opposition newspapers
were suspended, and martial law was established to combat the threat of
socialism. But the socialist point of view continued to spread, nowhere
more so than at the University of Rome, where Labriola introduced
Marxist thought to the academic world and such influential professors as
the anthropologist Lombroso were strong sympathizers of the socialist
cause. In this atmosphere of grinding poverty, disease, and high taxa-
tion, not only in the historically impoverished south but among the
sharecroppers and migratory agricultural workers of the Roman cam-
pagna, socialism seemed increasingly to be the only remedy to both the
rural and the urban poor. A Bolognese count was widely quoted as say-
ing, "The real and most dangerous agents of rural socialism are the pri-
mary teachers." ¹

The climate of political agitation was intense and bitter and culminat-

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