The forest kindergarten in Italy
In the spring of 1997, something quite unexpected happened in Cortina d’Ampezzo: a group of parents suddenly found themselves facing the closure of the kindergarten their little ones had been attending.
So they made a courageous—and certainly complex—decision: why not try a forest kindergarten?
This was the first experiment of its kind in Italy, unlike what had already been happening for years in several Northern European countries. And so began what would later be remembered as one of the earliest examples of a forest kindergarten in Italy, an experience that would leave a deep mark on everyone involved.
When you think about it, Cortina—with its magnificent mountains rising above lush green woods filled with plants, flowers, streams, waterfalls, and wildlife—was the ideal place for such an experiment.
The parents then asked the Montessori teacher Georg Hafner, who had previously guided their children in the former school, whether he would be willing to embark on this new adventure.
And that is how the Forest Kindergarten was born—an outdoor school the children attended for a full three months.
This first Forest Kindergarten in Italy became the seed of what, just a few months later, would grow into a fully developed Montessori educational project, promoted by the Association Facciamo un Nido, which founded the Centro Montessori Cortina.
(Sadly, this wonderful school was closed in 2024 due to the lack of commitment from the local administration of the time.)
During their months in the woods, the children experienced something priceless—an adventure documented in a beautiful photo album.
The first of the many images in that album is accompanied by these words: “It may sound like a fairy tale, yet it was real life for these children, who learned from the moss, the trees, the silence, the water—perhaps more, and in a more authentic way, than one could ever learn from books.“
The album itself received the Federbim Valsecchi National First Prize in 2000—an award given annually to those who contribute to the economic, social, cultural, and political growth of the Italian mountain regions.
It was also an honor for the board of Facciamo un Nido to receive a letter of praise, filled with appreciation and friendship, from Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, a student of Konrad Lorenz. A copy of the album was personally delivered to him at the Max-Planck-Institut in Munich.
The album tells the story of a small group of children from Cortina who, with joy and enthusiasm, lived the extraordinary experience of the Forest Kindergarten in the spring of 1997, in the area known as Pian de Loa.
Below is the text titled “The Children’s Mountain”, written as an introduction to the photo album by my friend Raniero Regni, Professor of Social Pedagogy at LUMSA University in Rome and author of the true story “Falling in Love with a Mountain”, which you can read here: Falling in Love with a Mountain.
The Children’s Mountain
Can mountains, lakes, fir trees, storms, and sunshine be educators and friends?
A child lying on the ground observes the shimmering architecture of the undergrowth up close. His eyes follow the larches rising above him and, beyond their tops, the sky and clouds.
Hermann Hesse once wrote—through a character born in a landscape much like the one familiar to the children of Cortina—that clouds are “the dreams of the earth, in which the human soul, made impure, clings again to the pure sky.”
The murmuring of a stream telling its story, the thoughtful growth of the fir trees, the radiant beauty of flowering meadows, the austere simplicity of snow-covered land, the rocky peaks that always say the same thing yet never cease to fascinate—can all this still have a place in education?
The children of the Forest Kindergarten make one think of Comenius, who encouraged learning from trees rather than books, playing on the harmony and contrast of those two words. They also recall the Wandervögel, the “migratory birds”—the youth movement that inspired young Germans between the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Their way of life was simple, almost Spartan, seeking communities where one could still tell stories and sing together. In evenings around the fire, in the long winter silence of rural life, on hikes toward peaks dreaming in distant horizons, they chased the ideal of “remaining pure while becoming mature.”
To think with the hands, with a kind of thought that smells of earth, moss, and ferns.
To think with the legs, with the slow, reflective rhythm of the mountain step.
This fulfills some of the natural rights of children: the right to get dirty, to breathe nature’s scents and taste its flavors, and the “right to the wild”—to climb trees or hide in tall grass.
These rights do not exclude, but rather strengthen, the right to develop a precise, scientific, and technical understanding of both the natural and human environment.
They come before—and after—the sterile requirements of programs and schoolwork.
In the Forest Kindergarten, children can finally have something to love without needing explanations.
The right to say yes to everything that is alive. A right that, if nurtured in childhood, can fill a person’s heart for an entire lifetime. “All this,” says Hesse’s Peter Camenzind, “can indeed fill a childhood, and perhaps a whole life. For it speaks loudly and clearly the language of God as it has never come from human lips.”
Looking at these photographs and recalling this experience brings to mind Montessori’s words: “Every useless help is an obstacle to development.”
Here, the children are helped to do as much as possible on their own. This is not survival training, nor the romantic contemplation of an occasional tourist. The life lived by these unusual pupils of the forest resonates with the work of mountain people—and perhaps even with that of scientists.
This is the same feeling experienced by Heidegger—one of the great philosophers of our time—when he compared his difficult search for the right word, alone in his mountain hut during a snowstorm, to the resistance with which tall fir trees withstand the tempests. His work, he said, was of the same nature as that of the farmers of his Alpine valley.
He added: “Only work opens the space in which this reality of mountains and valleys can emerge.”
When these children feel a kind of eternal glory rising within them as they watch a sunset or witness the splendor of nature, it will not be the artificial thrill of a skier or casual hiker. They will feel their existence gathering within itself, in the serious and free activity of the work they are doing.
If educational innovation does not come from the closed world of pedagogy, it is possible that the hardest form of education—education of being—might come from a forest kindergarten capable of protecting children, once grown up, from the speed, shallowness, and appearance that dominate our time.
The wandering life of these young explorers may in fact be surprisingly suited to our era.
On one hand, it recalls the lifestyle of our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors, who made up 99% of our species’ history.
On the other, it is not impossible that the skills learned in this natural environment will prove—paradoxically—highly valuable in the world of digital “hunters and gatherers.”
In the age of the Web, of networks and electronic webs, one can rediscover the deeper weave of the web of life—the network of all networks: life itself.
Yes, these children will eventually return home and enter the countless activities of our time. But they will keep with them respect, balance, moderation, the ethos of limits, and that closeness to the heart of things that the mountain taught them forever.
