Chapter 1                                                                                                                                     Back              Home             Next

My Early Life

First ten years • Father's death • Family difficulties • The widowed mother

I was born on the day dedicated to Mary Assumed into Heaven in 1815¹ in Murialdo near Castelnuovo d'Asti.² My mother's name was Margaret Occhiena and she was from Capriglio;³ my father's name was Francis.⁴ They were farmers who made their living by hard work and thrifty use of what little they had. My good father, almost entirely by the sweat of his brow, supported my grandmother, in her seventies and a prey to frequent illnesses; three young­sters; and a pair of farm helpers. Of the three children, the oldest was Anthony,⁵ born of his first wife; the second was Joseph;⁶ and the youngest was me, John.

  I was not yet two years old when the merciful Lord hit us with a sad bereavement. My dearly loved father died unexpectedly. He was strong and healthy, still young and actively interested in promoting a good Christian upbring­ing for his offspring. One day he came home from work covered in sweat and imprudently went down into a cold cellar. That night he developed a high temperature, the first sign of a serious illness. Every effort to cure him proved vain. Within a few days he was at death's door. Strengthened by all the comforts of religion, he recom­mended to my mother confidence in God, then died, aged only thirty-four, on 12 May 1817.⁷

  I do not know how I reacted on that sad occasion. One thing only do I remember, and it is my earliest memory. We were all going out from the room where he had died, and I insisted on staying behind.

  My grieving mother addressed me, "Come, John, come with me."

  "If papa's not coming, 1 don't want to come," I answered.

  "My poor son," my mother replied, "come with me; you no longer have a father." Having said this, she broke down and started crying as she took me by the hand and led me away. I began crying too because she was crying. At that age I could not really understand what a tragedy had fallen on us in our father's death.

  This event threw the whole family into difficulty. Five people had to be supported. The crops failed that year because of a drought," and that was our only source of income. The prices of foodstuffs soared. Wheat was as much as four francs a bushel, corn or maize two and a half francs.⁹ Some people who lived at that time have assured me that beggars hesitated to ask for even a crust of bread to soak into their broth of chickpeas or beans for nourish­ment. People were found dead in the fields, their mouths stuffed with grass, with which they had tried to quell their ravenous hunger.

  My mother often used to tell me that she fed the family until she exhausted all her food. She then gave money to a neighbour, Bernard Cavallo,¹⁰ to go looking for food to buy. That friend went round to various markets but was unable to buy anything, even at exorbitant prices. After two days he came in the evening bringing back nothing but the money he had been given. We were all in a panic. We had eaten practically nothing the whole day, and the night would have been difficult to face.

  My mother, not allowing herself to be discouraged, went round to the neighbours to try to borrow some food. She did not find anyone able to help. "My dying husband," she told us, "said I must have confidence in God. Let's kneel then and pray." After a brief prayer she got up and said, "Drastic circumstances demand drastic means." Then she went to the stable and, helped by Mr Cavallo, she killed a calf." Part of that calf was immediately cooked and the worst of the family's hunger satisfied. In the days that fol­lowed, cereals bought at a very high price from more dis­tant places enabled us to survive.

  Anyone can imagine how much my mother worked and suffered in that disastrous year. The crisis of that year was overcome by constant hard work, by continuous thrift, by attention to the smallest details and by occasional providen­tial help. My mother often told me of these events, and my relatives and friends confirmed them.

  When that terrible scarcity was over and matters at home had improved, a convenient arrangement was pro­posed to my mother. However she repeated again and again, "God gave me a husband and God has taken him away. With his death the Lord put three sons under my care. I would be a cruel mother to abandon them when they needed me most."

  On being told that her sons could be entrusted to a good guardian who would look after them well, she merely re­plied, "A guardian could only be their friend, but I am a mother to these sons of mine. All the gold in the world could never make me abandon them."¹²

  Her greatest care was given to instructing her sons in their religion, making them value obedience, and keeping them busy with tasks suited to their age. When I was still very small, she herself taught me to pray. As soon as I was old enough to join my brothers, she made me kneel with them morning and evening. We would all recite our prayers together, including the rosary. I remember well how she herself prepared me for my first confession. She took me to church, made her own confession first, then presented me to the confessor. Afterwards, she helped me to make my thanksgiving. She continued to do this until I reached the age when she judged me able to use the sacrament well on my own.¹³

  I had reached my ninth year.¹⁴ My mother wanted to send me to school, but this was not easy. The distance to Castelnuovo from where we lived was more than three miles; my brother Anthony was opposed to my boarding there. A compromise was eventually agreed upon. During the winter season I would attend school at the nearby vil­lage of Capriglio. In this way I was able to learn the basic elements of reading and writing.¹⁵ My teacher was a de­vout priest called Joseph Delacqua. He was very attentive to my needs, seeing to my instruction and even more to my Christian education.

  During the summer months I went along with what my brother wanted by working in the fields.¹⁶

Notes

1. Don Bosco always believed that he had been born on August 15. His mother had been dead a number of years when the custom of celebrating his birthday at the Oratory began. Thus she could not correct the mistake about this date. Even on the document placed beside his coffin (Salesian Bulletin, March 1888), his successor Father Michael Rua wrote, "He was born at Castelnuovo d'Asti, August 15, 1815."

It was only when the baptismal register was consulted after Don Bosco's death that the mistake was discovered. He had been baptized August 17 in the parish church, Saint Andrew's, by Father Joseph Festa. The register, signed by the pastor Father Joseph Sismondo, states clearly that John Melchior Bosco had been born heri vespere natus, i.e. on the evening of the sixteenth.

It was a custom in Piedmont to refer to anything that happened near the fifteenth — roughly from the vigil of the solemnity through its octave —as having occurred "on the Assumption." If, when John was a child, his relatives regu­larly used this expression of his birthday, his later mistake is understandable.

2. Castelnuovo d'Asti, now known as Castelnuovo Don Bosco, had about 3500 inhabitants in the early nineteenth century. It is about eighteen miles from Turin.

Morialdo, one of four districts (frazioni) linked with Ca­stelnuovo, is two and a half miles south of the town. (The other three districts are Bardella, Nevissano, and Ranello.) In 1815, two or three hundred people lived in Morialdo, scattered among a number of hamlets. Don Bosco spelled it "Murialdo" in keeping with the manner in which the Pied-montese of his day pronounced the letter "o".

For remarks on Don Bosco's birthplace, see the extended comment at the end of the notes.

  3. Capriglio is a village about four miles east of Morialdo. Don Bosco's mother was born at the Cecca farm in Serra di Ca­priglio, a hamlet of the town of Capriglio, on April i, 1788. She married the widower Francis Bosco on June 6, 1812. Though the Occhienas owned land, they were so poor that their dowry for Margaret's marriage was some work that one of her brothers performed for Francis. She was twenty-four, and he was twenty-eight.

4. Francis Louis Bosco was born in Castelnuovo on January 20, 1784. He was the fourth of six children born to Philip Anthony Bosco II (1735-1802) by his second wife, Margaret Zucca (1752-1826) —the grandmother of whom Don Bosco speaks. There were also six children from Philip's first mar­riage. Of these twelve children, only six survived childhood. It was Philip who moved the family from Castelnuovo to the Biglione farm as tenant farmers in 1793. . Francis married Margaret Cagliero on February 4, 1805. She bore him two children, Anthony and Teresa. Teresa, whom Don Bosco does not mention, was born on February 16, 1810, and died two days later.

5. Until recently, all Don Bosco's biographers gave February 3, 1803, as the date of Anthony's birth, on the basis of an 1885 letter from Don Bosco's nephew Francis Bosco, Joseph's son (Stella, LW, p. 10, n. 16). Anthony was in fact born on Feb­ruary 3, 1808. This gives us a clearer picture for interpreting the confrontation in the Bosco house between Anthony and young John (chapters 4-6): The age gap was seven years and not twelve, as formerly believed. Anthony died in 1849.

6. Joseph was born on April 8, 1813, and died in 1862.

7. Francis died on May n after a week's illness. He was in his thirty-fourth year, i.e. thirty-three years old. John was twenty-one months old.

8. The country around Turin is very hilly but fertile. However, the amount of precipitation and the temperature determine the quality of the annual harvest of grapes and cereals. Extremes of rain (drought one year, devastating downpours another) and of temperature are well known.

The famine of 1817-1818 was the result of drought. There had been less snow than usual during the winter of 1816-1817, ^and spring frosts killed much of the early plant­ing. Then the summer of 1817 was very dry.

9. Literally, "25 francs/i6 francs an emina." Don Bosco consis­tently uses "francs" rather than "lire." Because of Piedmont's close ties — cultural, linguistic, economic, and dynastic — with France, the Piedmontese had used the word "franc" as an equivalent of the lira long before the Napoleonic occupation of Piedmont.

The emina was an old Piedmontese measure of capacity. Its size varied from place to place; around Asti it was about twenty-three liters (6.3 bushels). In normal times an emina of maize would cost two or three lire. So the famine had, more or less, raised prices by six hundred percent.

10. The Bosco home was attached to the rear of the Cavallo home, which is the oldest structure on the little hill. In re­cent years, the former Cavallo home has housed the office of the rector of Don Bosco's shrine, a lobby, and a gift shop.

11. This was an act of desperation (T. Bosco, BN, pp. 15-16). The calf was the family's insurance against future disaster when money might be essential, for a fat calf would bring a good price at market. Margaret had decided that the disaster was at hand; there was no other way to feed her family.

12. What this arrangement could have been arouses our curios­ity concerning both the suitor and the exact nature of the proposal. Evidently it implied some neglect of Francis Bosco's three sons, which the widow Margaret admirably re­fused to consider. This is the only reference that Don Bosco seems ever to have made to it, and we know nothing else about it.

13. John would have been six or seven when he first received the sacrament of penance, by which Christ acts through his priestly minister to forgive sins committed since baptism.

Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), speaking to Christian families on the feast of Saint John Bosco, January 31, 1940, referred to the little house at Becchi:

Imagine the young widow with her three sons kneeling for morning and evening prayer. See the children, in their best clothes, going to the nearby village of Morialdo for holy Mass. See them gathered around her in the afternoon after a frugal meal in which there would only be a little bread on which she had invoked the Lord's blessing. She reminds her sons of the commandments of God and the Church, of the important lessons from the catechism, of the various means of salvation. She then goes on to speak in simple but forceful country terms of the tragic story of Cain and Abel, or of the painful death of her dear Jesus, nailed to the cross on Calvary for all of us. Who can possibly measure the lasting influence of the first les­sons given by a good mother to her children? It was to such lessons that Don Bosco the priest used to attribute his loving devotion to Mary and to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

14. John's ninth year was August 16, i823~August 15, 1824, when we would say that he was eight years old. From what we have been able to find through research, he should have said, "my tenth year."

15. We should note a few points about schooling in Piedmont. Young John's particular situation also deserves some comment.

The French occupation and the subsequent Restoration had thrown the country into a great deal of disorder. It was not until July 23, 1822, that a government education act was passed. For the first time, this law made the opening of free primary schools compulsory. However, the communes were allowed to recover their basic expenses by charging some tuition, which often amounted to something like twenty lire for the year; a hired farmhand's wages for the working sea­son was only fifteen lire.

The regulation envisaged instruction in the "four Rs": reading, writing, 'rithmetic, and religion. Lessons were to be given for three hours in the morning and three in the after­noon; in between, the pupils went home for dinner and perhaps for some chores.

The law mandated that schools open on November 3, after the harvest and the double church solemnity of All Saints' and All Souls' Days; they were supposed to be open until the end of September but in practice closed on the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25), when farmhands for the coming planting, cultivation, and harvest were hired in every town square.

Before 1822, in the ordinary rural community, the little bit of reading and writing that was taught would have been given in the home by some older member of the family. This would happen during the long Piedmontese winters when there was little farm work. Anthony almost certainly was taught this way and not in any formal schooling. John ap­parently had received a little such instruction from a local farmer sometime during 1823-1824.

Because of the many practical difficulties following the French occupation, the education law was a dead letter in most country districts. Most of the teachers were priests who, for one reason or another, were not fully involved in parish work. The large number of priests in the area around Castel-nuovo allowed the law to be implemented more easily there; so there were schools at both Castelnuovo and Capriglio.

16. Father Joseph Lacqua (not Delacqua, as Don Bosco writes it) was the teacher at Capriglio in 1824. He was not too happy at the idea of taking a boy from Becchi into his school, nor was he bound to take him, since Becchi belonged to the com­mune of Castelnuovo and not to Capriglio. Margaret had turned to him for several reasons. Anthony was totally against John's being sent to Castelnuovo, which was farther away from Becchi. Since John had to walk to or from school four times a day, there would be more time for helping out with the farmwork if he went to Capriglio. Finally, Mar­garet‘s family lived in Capriglio.

Around this time, however, Father Lacqua needed a housekeeper. Margaret had an unmarried older sister, Joan Mary Occhiena (always called Marianne). Father Lacqua asked her to work as his housekeeper. She agreed, possibly on condition that he enroll John in the school. At any rate, the priest did take John into his school; thus John got his first schooling and also had an aunt who could provide lodging for him if the weather turned foul.

Marianne remained Father Lacqua's housekeeper until he died around 1850. She then joined Mama Margaret at the Oratory as a helper in Don Bosco's work there.

John probably attended classes at Capriglio from autumn 1824 to spring 1826, when he was nine and ten years old. He was older than the rest of the pupils, and they sometimes made fun of him. He may have attended briefly in the autumn of 1826, when a family crisis long brewing came to a boil. For more details of this period see Molineris, pp. 133-139.

Comment on Don Bosco's Birthplace

Nearly three miles south of Castelnuovo Don Bosco is Becchi, a cluster of ten farmhouses within the district of Morialdo. It takes its name from Bechis, the surname of a family once associated with the little hilltop. This name, pluralized and Italianized (from the Piedmontese dialect), became Becchi.

A little to the south of Becchi and farther up the hill lay the Canton Cavallo, i.e. the property and house of the Cavallos. Here the Boscos owned the farmhouse long venerated as the saint's birthplace; there he grew up, there he came for his vacations, and there (in his own new house) his older brother Joseph lived from 1839 till 1862. Becchi was John Bosco's native place.

But the research of Secondo Caselle (Cascinali e contadini in Monferrato: I Bosco di Chieri nel secolo XVIII [Rome: LAS, 1975]), former mayor of Chieri and devotee of Don Bosco, has proven that John was born not at this family farmstead but at the Bi-glione farm (castina Biglione) about two hundred yards still farther up the hill, to the south. Francis Bosco was a tenant farmer con­tracted to Biglione, and John was born in the Biglione house.

Francis Bosco had two hired farmhands. So the Boscos, though peasants, were not destitute. Having saved his money, in Feb­ruary 1817 Francis was able to buy from Francis Graglia a house lower down the slope on the edge of the Becchi hamlet, with about three-quarters of an acre of land. He paid one hundred lire. The patterns of inflation and recession caused the value of the lira to fluctuate somewhat; so it is difficult to fix its true value in contemporary terms. But during the first half of the nineteenth century it was reasonably stable. Teresio Bosco (Mem, p. 178, n. i; SP, p. 45) estimates that the lira was worth about four thousand 1985 lire, or US $2.60. In the 18505 and i86os it cost Don Bosco about eighty centesimi per day to keep each boy in his community (Stella, EcSo, pp. 371-372).

Francis intended to renovate the house considerably and perhaps had begun to do so while fulfilling his last con­tract with Biglione when he caught pneumonia and died in May 1817. That tragedy did not prevent Biglione from suing Margaret Bosco to compel her to fulfill her husband's contract. Margaret moved the family to Becchi in November after the harvest, and she spent another sixty lire on renovations.

  The house that Francis had bought was a decrepit affair at­tached to the rear of the Cavallo home. It contained very modest living quarters and a stable; overhead was a large hayloft, and the whole was roofed with tile. Margaret fixed the downstairs quar­ters into a decent kitchen-living room and left the stable as it was. Part of the hayloft was left over the stable, the rest of the upstairs being divided into two bedrooms that were accessible either by an outside stairs or by a trapdoor in the kitchen ceiling.

  In 1886 Don Bosco dreamt that his mother took him to the top of the small hill just south of their house. Mother and son talked about the good to be done in this area as they looked down on the plain stretching around the hill. Don Bosco woke up from his sleep while still in the middle of this conversation. Afterwards, speaking of this dream, he commented that the hill did seem like a good place for a Salesian foundation since it was in the center of a number of villages too far from the churches. Details of the dream may be found in MB XIX, 382-383.

  The Salesians — entirely unaware of the dream at the time — ac­quired the entire hilltop from its various owners in 1930. Soon after, rector major Father Peter Ricaldone and economer general Father Fidelis Giraudi chose the site for a new Salesian technical school when funds were donated for that purpose. This became the Bernardi-Semeria Salesian Institute, and it was built behind the Biglione farmhouse at the top of the hill.

  Then Fathers Ricaldone and Giraudi began to dream of build­ing a great church in honor of the Salesians' newly canonized founder. Actual planning was not possible until the late 19505. Ironically, the site chosen was next to the school and stretching northward; it demanded the removal of the Biglione house, which was torn down in 1958! The great Tempio di Don Bosco was constructed between 1961 and 1965. The house had stood on the site almost directly beneath the main altar of today's tempio.

  The entire hilltop today is commonly known as "Colle Don Bosco" (Don Bosco's Hill).