One of the most beautiful things in my life was knowing Mariangela and being her friend. We met at the university chapel, where don Gianni Rotondi was teaching us a Christianity that was "anticlerical" in spirit—rooted in inner life and love for others. Not long after, when he opened the chapel to dialogue with Protestant students, the diocese sent him away. But our group stayed close. There were many from the Mazzarotto and Bertolini families among us. I remember Mariangela laughing as she told how her schoolmates would ask: "How many brothers and sisters do you have?" "Nine." "Nine including you?" "No, nine others. There are ten of us." And they would stare at her as if she'd come from another planet.
I had grown up quite alone, with a sister born six years after me, so I was fascinated by the big Mazzarotto family—all young people who welcomed me with warmth and generosity. Their parents had died, and Mariangela, along with her older siblings, had much to manage. But she carried her responsibilities with joy, and I never heard her complain.
For a long time I went to her house almost every day to study for our two-year Italian exam on Sapegno. I discovered a new way of learning, where the point wasn't so much memorizing as thinking deeply about the subjects we explored. We read, talked, debated, hashed things out for months—the curriculum was enormous—and by the end I was a different person. I had learned to see things from another angle: more concrete, more human, more mature. For Mariangela, culture was not empty abstraction. It was a way of living.
After I married and moved to Ancona, I didn't see her again. We spoke on the phone, and each time it was as if we had just seen each other the day before. Fifty years have passed. I always read her editorials in Ombre e Luci, and in them I recognized her trusting way of facing life, her courage, her intelligence and sensitivity. I always meant to visit her, but I kept putting it off.
Many people I knew fifty years ago have passed out of my life without my even remembering their names. Others entered my heart and left me changed. Meeting Mariangela was a gift from God. If I had not known her, I would probably be more withered, more cerebral, more self-centered.
Gabriella Boyer, 2014
