31 March 2026
They are called the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption, but they are better known as the “little sisters of Martinengo,” after the name of the Milan street where their mother house is located. Their natural habitat is decidedly the urban peripheries.
Sister Barbara has known those of Catania, Turin and, for the past eighteen years, Rome. Together with her fellow sisters, she carries out a discreet yet valuable work of supporting families in difficulty, especially from a socio-health perspective, but in recent years increasingly also in educational support.
“We don’t solve problems,” she explains, “we share people’s lives.” And people are usually very grateful for that. Like the Muslim friends who, in recent days, involved the sisters in the celebrations marking the end of Ramadan. Or the young mother from abroad who calls her “my mum in Italy,” so much so that, for her daughter, Sister Barbara has officially become a grandmother.
“I’ve always gone to the Meeting,” she says. “But last year I told myself that, before I die, I had to try being a volunteer at least once.” Said and done. Among more than a hundred possible options, she chooses fundraising without hesitation: “We do it in our congregation too.”
A nun in fundraising? More like a force of nature. A surge of enthusiasm that draws everyone along. And when we ask her what she takes home from this experience, she has no doubts: “Fundraising is the beauty of seeing people and the generosity they express.”
A generosity that concerns everyone, but which strikes her especially in children: “They come to the desk maybe for the gadgets, but then, when you explain what it’s about, they listen very carefully. And in the end they go and call their mum and dad.”
She sums up the meaning of this experience in a simple yet powerful sentence: “It’s beautiful to awaken in others the desire to give and to take part in something beautiful.”
But in what sense is the Meeting something beautiful?
“I’ve always experienced it as an opening, a breath of fresh air. You perceive a horizon on life and the world that you don’t find in any other public event.” Then she quotes the italian singer Gino Paoli, who passed away recently: “The Meeting is ‘a sky in a room.’ It allows you to embrace the world, to encounter experiences and situations that expand your heart. How often do you find yourself saying: ‘I didn’t know this.’”
And she adds: “It is a tangible experience—cultural, religious, historical, scientific—of the fact that all reality is crossed by a gaze, by a judgment that touches your heart and makes you say: ‘I want to look at the world this way.’”
That is why it is worth supporting the Meeting: “Because here it’s as if everything you encounter becomes yours. A desire is born to let others know about it, because it is something that can make both me and the world truly live.”
Among her most vivid memories of the 2025 Meeting are the exhibitions on Ukraine and on the martyrs of Algeria: “How often we meet people, even from other countries, discouraged, with war and destruction in their eyes. They don’t know experiences like these, where you see that it is possible to live even within war.”
Finally, she quotes Don Giussani from memory: it is our nature that drives us to take an interest in others, in every person. “In everyone, not only in Christians.”
The Meeting is precisely this: a place that awakens the human heart, made for self-giving, for sharing. And sharing “is the gaze that God has upon us.”
