The urbanization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century represented a social and educational challenge to all Europe. The First World War caused a crisis on nineteenth century’s optimism and the emerging fascist movement in Italy was able to criticize liberal beliefs. A different relationship between city and countryside was one of the traits that characterized the rural policy and propaganda of fascism. Mussolini could speak to Italians by leveraging on their attachment to the rural roots. Contact with nature, virility, courage and integrity, classical values of rural life, were well-suited to accompany the rhetoric of the regime. Emblematic is the case of the kindergarten named, after the model of Rosa and Carolina Agazzi’s, “scuola materna”. This indicates a profound theoretical distance from the choices of Maria Montessori. The aim of the paper is to highlight the logic that underlay the ideological and pedagogical project of economic "conversion" based on self-sufficiency. Ruralism during the Fascist era was based not only on the idea of changing the relationship between city and countryside, but on the principle of building cities and institutions on the basis of a new conception of space and life.