The evolution of Margherita Zoebeli's kindergarten in a local, national and transnational perspective (1946-1968)

This article aims to reconstruct part of the history of the kindergarten founded by Margherita Zoebeli in 1946 and opened on 1st May 1946. The kindergarten was a key institution in the history of pre-school education, not only because of the type of children who originally attended it, but also because of the evolution of its activities between 1946 and the 1980s, when its name changed from giardino d’infanzia (kindergarten) to scuola materna (maternal school) and later scuola dell’infanzia (infant school). The evolution of the children’s activities in the school is reconstructed here through original documents from UNESCO and the Archivio Margherita Zoebeli (Margherita Zoebeli Archive)1. UNESCO sponsored the Fédération Internationale des Communautés d’Enfants (FICE), of which the Rimini kindergarten was a member from 1948. From the war years until the end of the 1960s, the internal organisation of the kindergarten combined various elements, based, on the one hand, on the German Froebel approach – which was very popular in the pre-school institutions of the time – and, on the other, on innovations developed through direct contact with the experts of the time or through reading their works.