Princess of Wales to visit Reggio Emilia on early years education trip

Catherine, Princess of Wales, used her first official overseas trip since her cancer diagnosis in 2024 to put early years education at the center of a visit with clear diplomatic as well as personal weight. Her two-day trip to Reggio Emilia, Italy, on 13 and 14 May 2026 was presented by Kensington Palace and Reggio Children as part of her long-running work on early childhood through the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood.

The choice of Reggio Emilia was deliberate. The city is the home of the Reggio Emilia Approach, an influential model that Reggio Children describes as an educational philosophy built around the child as a rights-bearing learner who develops through the “hundred languages” of human beings. The approach grew out of postwar civic action, when local residents, including many women, helped finance some of the city’s first nursery schools by selling scrap metal left behind by retreating German forces. It later expanded into a municipal network of infant-toddler centres and preschools that became a reference point for educators far beyond Italy.

Reggio Children says the approach now has dialogue and exchange with more than 130 countries and territories, a reach that gives the royal visit significance well beyond one city. The organization and the Municipality of Reggio Emilia said the trip marked a major step in the international expansion of the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood and a recognition of a public-school model that grew from the first self-managed preschools in the 1950s into a system studied worldwide.

For Catherine, the visit also marked a carefully managed return to public duties after a period dominated by illness. She announced remission in January 2025 after revealing her cancer diagnosis in 2024, and the Reggio Emilia trip became the first official overseas appearance of that recovery phase. The Royal Family has said her early childhood work has focused on the period from conception to age five, linking those earliest years to later-life problems including addiction, family breakdown, poor mental health, suicide and homelessness.

That framing gives the trip a sharper institutional meaning. By choosing early years education, Catherine placed her work at the intersection of social policy, civic renewal and international influence. Reggio Emilia offered a city whose history matches that message: a local, publicly funded model built from community action after war, now elevated into a global example as the Princess of Wales resumes a visible role on the world stage.