In Trent with Chiara Lubich

The places speak

Franco de Battaglia*

I larici guides
Il Margine Publisher

In the northern Italian city of Trent, Prepositura Street is located close to the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, where the Council of the counter-Reform took place: there, in 1920, a little girl by the name of Silvia Lubich was born, later to become the beloved Chiara, foundress of the Focolare Movement that has now spread worldwide.

When, in September 1943, allied bombs fell on her city, which massacred 300 innocent people, that absurd scenario of death urged the young teacher from Trent to gather around her a first group of friends and to become a revolutionary for love, a tireless builder of unity among Christians and of interreligious dialogue.

From the «little house» that became the first focolare on Capuchins Square, to the Gocciadoro woods, from the poor people’s Hall to the cathedral, an excellent journalist, Franco de Battaglia, reconstructs the geographical map of Chiara Lubich’s Trent: an unusual guide that leads one to discover the places and the whole existential journey of one of the most important religious leaders of the twentieth century.

* Franco de Battaglia was born in Trent in 1943. He is a journalist, author of essays on historical and environmental topics, among which an «Encyclopaedia of the Dolomite Mountains» (Zanichelli). He was director of the daily newspapers «Alto Adige» of Trent and Bolzano and «Corriere delle Alpi» of Belluno. Currently, he is a lead writer of the «Trentino» newspaper and collaborator of «Cooperazione Trentina.»