16

ORATORY

I am the scion of institutions. Religious ones in my case. Religious corporations educated me.

My father died when I was barely sixteen months old. My aunt was already living on her own, my mother worked all day, my sister likewise. I studied and lived in the street. At this point the “De Gasperi” sisters stepped in, two women who owned a small grocery nearby, at the corner of Via Maria Vittoria and Via Bogino. They got their nickname because they were ultra-Catholic. “Why doesn’t this boy go to the oratory?”

So I began to frequent the oratory of San Filippo Neri next door to us, from the courtyard of which you could see the windows of Palazzo Campana. Not out of faith, but for the playmates and the games. Yet it was a decisive passage in my life.

I’ve always been a group animal, a gregarious animal, albeit with my own individual profile. I was useless at soccer, but I became one of the leaders of Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action) in Turin. In those years and in that setting I met and became friends with Furio Colombo.

Community living gives you many stimuli, but mostly superficial ones. It’s true, though, that the “sexual problem,” as Sandro Penna calls it, was largely “muffled” in those years at the oratory. Well, not largely. A little.

I was a little saint. Mass every morning, with the main problem being to get to confession the evening before if you had committed “impure acts,” so that you could take communion the next day.

And on Saturday afternoon, parties for young teens at the homes of well-off schoolgirls. We boys had to bring the pastries. And often I hadn’t enough money. We discovered a place that sold pastries at a discount. God knows what was in them.

I felt liked, however. There was one priest in particular who helped me in all kinds of ways. No money for a school trip? He gave it to me. I read and studied. Snacked on bread, butter, and marmalade. Before long I would abandon Jack London for Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain, but Death in Venice as well.