The kindergarten was, in all countries but Germany, a foreign import. The most familiar aspect of its diffusion to American scholars is the spread of Froebel's teachings into England and the United States by emigrants who had left the German Confederation after the failure of the revolutions of 1848-49. Familiar as well are the propaganda efforts by Baroness Bertha von Marenholtz-Bulow in Western Europe, especially in the 1850s when kindergartens were banned in Prussia. The recent anthology edited by Roberta Wollons, "Kindergartens and Cultures," has shown that many countries received this institution secondhand, as Japan and Australia did via the United States. Italy receives no attention either in that volume or in the special issue of "History of Education," "Early Years Education: Some Froebelian Contributions," edited by Kevin J. Brehony in 2006. In fact, the importation of Froebel's ideas into Catholic countries in general has been seriously neglected in English-language scholarship. The only non-Italian treatment of the spread of Froebelian ideas in Italy is a brief one in a survey of Italian pre-school education during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries published in France in 1999, which omits some of the pioneers and puts kindergartens founded by others in the wrong cities. In this article, the author discusses the introduction of kindergartens in Italy, which involved not only importation of a "foreign" institution, but also significant number of Jews and Protestants, both foreign and domestic. (Contains 37 footnotes.)