The Fragile: A Book Review

«We were pioneers of something that didn't yet have a name. (…) We followed no books, no ideological principles. Our story began with these lives». This is no fable, no novel, no socially conscious television drama. It is the true story of the Parpagliona Community in Sesto San Giovanni—a place that has welcomed, accompanied, and supported fragile people, those living with disability and mental distress, since 1986 in what was once called the Stalingrad of Italy. Willed into being by Cardinal Martini and founded by Don Virginio Colmegna, it was one of the first communities to emerge after the Basaglia law, allowing women and men in difficulty to be supported in paths toward autonomy and life, in collaboration with their families, friends, and neighborhoods. This story—true, utterly true—is told through a many-voiced dialogue among those who built it, in a book that burns with life. It embodies a "pedagogy of being in the midst," and in bearing suffering itself, it proclaims the Gospel through the names, faces, and lives of those who came knocking at the door—or at whose doors others came to knock.