On June 9th, we celebrated Maria's baptism at the Carro—a moment that brought together around her, her parents Matteo and Ivana, and the community itself all the friends, relatives, and people who, each in their own way and free time, felt connected to what the community represents. The day held special significance because we were also marking five years since the community's founding. So alongside Maria's baptism, we celebrated Sabina, Viviana, and Mimmo—the three disabled young people whose lives embody the meaning and fruit of those five years. I had been part of the Carro for only the last fifteen months, so I can't offer a full accounting or trace its evolution. But I can try to describe a particular way of life, a daily rhythm quite different from what you find in "normal" families.
My first contact with the Carro was largely by chance. I didn't know anyone in the community and wasn't part of any Fede e Luce group where it was known. I was waiting for a response to my application for conscientious objector status. During that wait, you seek out organizations where you'd like to do your civil service, and I was looking for a chance to spend a year living in community—an experience that had always fascinated me, and that mandatory civil service gave me both the opportunity and perhaps the courage to try. Through Lucia Bertolini, I learned about the Carro, called Matteo, the community's coordinator, and went to talk with him about the possibility. We agreed that before making a decision, it made sense to get to know each other and for me to test whether my good intentions could handle the reality of the community—especially my way of relating to the young people, something I had no experience with. So I began going to the Carro once a week for what other organizations call an "internship," though in my case it was a search for deeper mutual understanding between me and the community. We decided it could work, started the paperwork, and without any complications, Easter week 1995 I began my life in community.
I understood that Mimmo had welcomed me not just as a member of the household, but as someone he could trust, and a friendship grew between us that I'm very proud of.
When I arrived, the community consisted of Matteo, Ivana, Rosaria, and the three young people—Mimmo, Sabina, and Viviana. My first week was extraordinary: because it fell during Easter, Matteo, Ivana, and Rosaria desperately needed a few days off. But Mimmo, unlike Viviana and Sabina, had nowhere else to go. So I took responsibility for him. It was trial by fire. With hardly any time to settle in, I found myself in an unfamiliar house, responsible for someone I barely knew, and had to spend a week figuring out, moment by moment, how to relate to him. I had no experience to draw on. But looking back, that week was crucial to my full integration into the community. By the end of it, I understood that Mimmo had welcomed me not just as a household member but as someone he could trust. An unexpected friendship was born, and I'm very proud of it. That extraordinary week over, my life in community began. The hardest part for me was adjusting to the rhythms and pace of communal living—especially the regular schedules necessary to give the young people clear landmarks for their day, particularly for Sabina, who needs to understand how the day unfolds. This regularity wasn't easy for me to maintain (Ivana always jokes that when I cook, dinner is at least half an hour late, if we're lucky), because I'm naturally disorganized. What helped me sync with the others was the total trust I felt from Matteo, Ivana, and Rosaria, and the strong bond that immediately formed with the young people. Relating to them was a daily discovery and exercise in reaching toward them. I tried to build a relationship by waiting for Mimmo, Viviana, and Sabina to let me into their daily lives, to welcome me as a friend to live under the same roof. I've already said how it went with Mimmo—he was perhaps the easiest to break the ice with. With Viviana and Sabina it took longer. Viviana is very affectionate from the start, but she has a strong will, and you have to be delicate with her or you'll end up in the category of "pests." So I'd ask her what she preferred to do, how she spent her time, and I'd ask her to teach me to cook and help with chores. Only over time did I earn her trust as someone she could lean on—though even now Viviana says of me, "that one can't do anything right," and she's not entirely wrong. With Sabina it was different. With Mimmo and Viviana, I could use my usual channels of communication: words, gestures, tone of voice, facial expressions. With Sabina, these channels were one-way. She smiles, shouts when happy or nervous, refuses what doesn't suit her, pinches when joking or venting anger—she makes herself understood clearly. With her, I could only use touch to communicate, because she sees almost nothing, hears very little, and doesn't speak. The relationship with Sabina—seeking connection with her—was perhaps the richest part of my early months at the Carro. There aren't many activities to do with her; the most meaningful is getting her to move, especially to walk. I used these long walks to make myself known and recognized, played with her hands, let her hear my voice. Day after day, I felt closer to her, and in the way she'd take my arm or reach for my hands, I sensed she understood a new person was spending time with her. What still troubles me is my inability to understand her in difficult moments. When she's angry or in pain, we're lost, unsure how to be near her, because often then she refuses physical contact—our only real channel of communication. I can't forget the image of the first time I saw Sabina cry: an experience where I felt utterly helpless, despite wanting to show her affection and closeness, precisely because she wouldn't let me sit beside her or hold her. In those moments you realize the suffering, the pain, and perhaps the loneliness that someone like Sabina might live with—an aspect that the frenzy of daily life can make you forget. With the other community members—Matteo, Ivana, and Rosaria—I found no real friction, because I felt welcomed in the truest sense. I wasn't just meant to adapt to an already-built reality; from the start, I was asked to "enter" community with my whole self, contributing through my way of living and seeing to the Carro's journey. This immediate openness helped me reciprocate—to embrace what was lived in community without ideological prejudices, to trust the people in front of me and begin a shared path together. Before this, for me sharing meant holding common ideas and ideals, pooling something abstract. Now I add material sharing: the same table, the same wallet, the same spaces, the same times. That's what sharing means, and you can't do community life without it. The people you share this way with—in my case Matteo, Ivana, Rosaria, Mimmo, Viviana, and Sabina—you build a bond that's hard to explain in words. The feeling I carry is of having a new family with bonds you can only feel when you truly share so much. Living under the same roof, eating together, working side by side each day, praying together, exchanging ideas, talking, playing—all these daily acts of sharing happen at the Carro and bind people together. I want to say something about prayer, an aspect that in my life as a Christian had always stayed somewhat on the margins. At the Carro, we pray every day. As Mimmo says, "it's a community of faith." We pray in the morning when we wake, before meals, in the evening. This normalcy, this habit of prayer, has helped me recover something I'd set aside: we are not alone in our life's journey, and it's essential—especially in a particular experience like community—to continuously check in with ourselves about our choices and our resources. Prayer can offer this daily moment of reflection, this chance to pause the day and look within ourselves so we understand a bit more and give more meaning to what we're living. At the Carro, prayer is lived freely and intensely, and for me it was rediscovering something very important. By now I hope I've given some sense of my experience of life in the "Il Carro" community, and hope too that I've conveyed how this year has become part of me—as a source of personal reflection, but above all as a building of relationships of love and sharing with the people I lived with. My hope is that others might have the curiosity and chance to experience community living, perhaps using (as I did) civil service as an opportunity to "gain" a year that at first might look like a year lost. - Filippo Ascenzi, 1996