History

Coldigioco has always had a calling to be a place dedicated to education. In the postwar years, it played a leading role in national educational experimentation, hosting an extraordinary example of cooperative education pedagogy. In 1951, teacher Pino Tamagnini (a native of the area, born in Fornelle, just a hundred meters from Coldigioco), inspired by Freinet's popular pedagogy, founded the MCE (Movimento di Cooperazione Educativa) in Fano with other teachers.

 

Thanks to teacher Giovanna Legatti (wife of Pino Tamagnini himself), exactly ten years later, from 1961 to 1971, the tiny rural school of Coldigioco was among the first in Italy to experiment with and implement the innovative and distinctive teaching techniques of the MCE, such as typography, correspondence with students from other schools nationwide, free writing activities, like journaling, besides enhancing collaboration and socialization. This important contribution to the history of national pedagogy,  instilling values that worked towards to the construction and strengthening of a more democratic, free, and open-minded society, earned Giovanna Legatti the affectionate nickname "Teacher of Italy."

 

And it is precisely those same values that are still pursued today at Coldigioco as a research center, romantically continuing to host in those same classrooms students and teachers from all over the world, and paradoxically, by a twist of synchronicity and magical coincidence, having as its director, and one of its founders, Alessandro Montanari, a former student of the MCE pedagogical experiment, a pupil of Maestro Novelli from the Mazzini school in Ancona, and a correspondent of Coldigioco, school of the teacher of Italy Giovanna Legatti.