Threshold - II
My mother falls ill in Bergamo.
It was the school year of 1972-1973. My mother left our father in the fallout of a disintegrated marriage, and she took my brother and me to Bergamo, Italy, a medieval city nestled in the foothills of the Italian Alps.
Beyond the simple escape of leaving the chaos that fall, my mother was pursuing a diploma at the International Center for Montessori Studies. Maria Montessori’s son — and closest lifetime collaborator — founded the center specifically for the training of elementary school teachers. Mario still taught there. The training was the real deal.
To do this, my mother took a year’s sabbatical from directing the Princeton Montessori School. My mother was a pioneer in her own right. In the late ‘60s, she founded her Montessori school in the basement of a convent and grew it for almost two decades. It thrives to this day on the campus she established. I visited it when it was a dirt field and a conversation about bank loans falling through. My mother was al…
