Pier Giorgio Frassati was born in Turin on April 6, 1901, Holy Saturday. He was the son of Alfredo Frassati and Adelaide Ametis. His father had been the owner of the daily newspaper «La Stampa» for six years, and was the architect of the great success that the newspaper enjoyed in the 1913s and 1920s, until fascism forced him to sell it. He was a liberal. A friend of Giovanni Giolitti, the Piedmontese politician who was head of the Italian government for many years, in XNUMX he became a senator of the Kingdom and, in XNUMX, Italian ambassador to Berlin.
His demanding commitments prevented him from following his children's education very closely. It was up to the mother to take greater responsibility for the growth of Pier Giorgio and Luciana, who was born just over a year later.
The educational atmosphere, as is the custom of the times, is one of general rigidity.
When, as a child, he learned the first stories of the Gospel, Pier Giorgio was struck by them, sometimes so profoundly that he became the protagonist of unexpected gestures in such a small child.
In the discovery of the religious dimension of existence, the father, a non-believer, cannot accompany them, but he respects her and does not hinder her path.
The spirituality of Adelaide Ametis, a woman endowed with sensitivity that is also expressed in painting, tends to suffocate under the veil of religious norms and precepts. Pier Giorgio, since he was a child, having learned the latter with care and great seriousness, has the ability to find their profound meanings, and to make faith become concrete life.
Having taken the starting point in this way, he will consciously follow his path as a young man of God in a profound one-on-one relationship with the Lord of his life who had wanted to meet him so early.
One day, when a frail woman knocked on the door with a barefoot child in her arms, she quickly took off her shoes and socks and handed them to her, quickly closing the door before anyone from the house could come running to protest. In Pollone's nursery school, the little ones had breakfast at midday. Pier Giorgio, intent on admiring those long marble tables with holes for the bowls, which were new to him, saw over there, at the end of the room, far from everyone, a child isolated because of a violent eruption; he immediately approached him and, before Sister Celeste, busy talking to Grandfather Francesco, noticed, one spoonful each, one spoonful each, Dodo erased the sadness of solitude from the face of the isolated little boy.
Luciana Frassati from Pier Giorgio Frassati. The Days of His Life