"I'm Roberto, I've come for lunch at your place!"
It's Sunday, lunchtime. The table is already set. Beyond my family, four guests are expected. Roberto is downstairs at the gate, waiting for my answer. He always catches me off guard. I've told him a hundred times to let me know before he comes.
Roberto is a friend—I've known him for twenty years. He has a mild intellectual disability. He lives nearby in a group home. He has some freedom to move about, a great simplicity of heart, and no sense of convention. For him, coming to eat at our house is a gift he gives us, a surprise.
I try to tell him: "Roberto, I have people over today..." His silence disarms me. "All right, come on up."
He enters, greets everyone like old friends, sits at the table without any awkwardness, happy to be with us.
"Could I stay at your place for a night?" I asked don Francesco many years ago. He lived in Parma with his elderly mother and two sisters.
It was always complicated to take my daughter to a hotel. Don Francesco knew our difficulty, and his answer—and that of his women—exceeded all expectations. They had set the table as if for a great feast, and the place of honor was for her, like a little princess on a state visit. I can still see his old mother bent over the stove, preparing a special menu suited to the child's needs. After all these years, it still moves me to tears.
It's ten at night. A sudden phone call: two newlyweds from Eastern Europe, hitchhiking on their honeymoon, need a place to stay. "We just got dropped off from a car. We don't know where we are. Can you come pick us up?" It gets under my skin. I want to tell them to get lost.
I call my friend—the one person I know with a gift for hospitality—to ask if she can help. Nicoletta has a generosity and thoughtfulness in welcoming people that I've never found in anyone else.
Without hesitation, she sets out to find the two "fools," loads them into her car, takes them to her house. She puts her children to sleep on the floor in the living room, prepares dinner and a bedroom for the newlyweds, and the next day gives them all the information they need—both to stay with her and to visit the city.
It's not simple or easy to always be ready to open your home for a few hours or days to an unexpected guest. We find excuses. We say we don't have enough space, that other family members wouldn't agree.
And yet it is so beautiful, so important, for someone in difficulty to find the warmth of a welcoming home—and for the host to train the heart to open.
Unfortunately, the comfort we live in has made us all a little afraid of others, of strangers, of people whose names we don't know. We're reluctant to give up, even for a few hours, our comforts and routines. Forced to install bars and alarms on our doors and windows, we live on edge, braced for dangerous intruders. And in doing so, we have gradually removed from our lives an ancient gift: the gift of hospitality.
The testimonies we present in this issue may seem to some a bit too exemplary. Some will simply say: "These are exceptional people!" But others—and we hope they are the majority—will look at the Nativity scene and offer the Christ child our wishes on His two-thousandth birthday. They will think again about how to make room in their own homes for so many of His brothers and sisters, who, like Him, "stand at our doors and knock."
— Mariangela Bertolini, 1999