When I started working on my biography of the Italian physician Maria Montessori, I worried I wouldn’t be able to do justice to her personal life. People associate the name Montessori with a style of schooling that lets children focus on their interests, unhindered by the constraints of traditional education. But very little is known about the woman who created the revolutionary educational model.
Maria Montessori, the early-20th-century Italian doctor and teacher, was a distinctly modern woman, both privately and professionally.
