Becoming a mining engineer is more than a dream for Pier Giorgio: it is an integral part of his life project.
As graduation approaches, his anxiety to finish his studies grows. When he talks to his friends about "his miners" his face lights up: he already sees himself in the mine, sharing the hard and heavy work with them.
He conceives the profession as a concrete and effective way to help the world to walk on the path of justice and sharing.
The missionary spirit of Pier Giorgio, who had also toyed with the idea of consecrating himself and going to Latin America, is therefore evident in his orientation towards work.
The drive for a mission in a distant land survives in the idea of going to work in the Ruhr, the lucrative mining area disputed between Germany and France, where German workers suffer under French occupation.
But even before death, which would have denied any possibility, Pier Giorgio gives up on his great project. He gives in to the request of his father, who has always considered him his heir in the management of «La Stampa». The plan is to enter the administration of the newspaper to learn the trade. But there will be no time.
The Second Vatican Council will say that "by their vocation it is proper to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to God" (lumen gentium, no. 31).
Pier Giorgio's life thus appears as the response to an authentic lay vocation lived to the full, which also matured through the frank questioning of whether God's will was to see him as a priest, and reading the answer in situations.
One early morning I was going with Pier Giorgio to the church of S. Martino and talking to him I asked him what he wanted to become. He replied that he wanted to become a priest, but added: "I want to be able to help my people in every way and I can do this better as a layman than as a priest, because here the priests are not in such contact with the people, as in Germany. As a mining engineer I can, by setting a good example, act in a very effective way."
Louise Rahner, mother of the Jesuit theologians Karl and Hugo, where Pier Giorgio was a guest in 1921, by Luciana Frassati, Calendar of a lifetime, October 6, 1921