Turns 45 years oldCilla voluntary associationwhich takes its name from Maria Letizia Galeazzi – called Cilla by family and friends – who died at the age of fifteen in a road accident on 5 July 1976, half a century ago: a crash into a lorry and a cervical fracture, while her brother Alessandro, known as “Cicco”, was driving and remained unharmed; she was born in Asti on 18 August ’61. Three years after his premature and sudden death, his father Rino – a doctor by profession – and his mother Elsa Strati with many of their friends from the Comunione e Liberazione movement, “in a particular circumstance of the illness of a young girl from Asti, encounter the difficulties of the sick who find themselves forced to leave their homeland and their loved ones to reach Italian or foreign hospitals in which to receive specialist care”, explain the managers of the Odv, chaired by Luca Petrolo.
Thus on 20 May 1981 the Cilla Association was established and in 1992 it opened the first reception center in the University Hospital of Padua, followed twenty years ago by the one in the Circolo di Varese hospital. On November 23, 2022 the association, which today it has 18 shelters in 15 cities with 300 beds and 150 volunteers, she is received in audience by Pope Francis. As many as 6 thousand people are welcomed every year and in various cities a collaboration has been started with local associations operating in the social and healthcare sector.
The presence of the association in the shelters «has the aim of promoting a dynamic of familiarity in which the home becomes a place of education and meeting for everyone. Not the offer of a “service”, but a reality where one is helped to bear the pain and perhaps to rediscover one’s stature as a man. Each house has a kitchen for cooking special dishes to take to the sick, rooms for washing and ironing and common meeting spaces which are an opportunity for friendship between guests and volunteers. Furthermore, the possibility of being “meetable” in a physical place located within the hospital is one of the most appropriate responses for closeness with people and the establishment of simple human relationships in the tiring occasion of illness and the loneliness that often accompanies it.”
The reception centers in hospitals have become “an important point of reference for requests for help from patients and their families, often through the head nurses or hospital chaplains” and at the same time “a coordination of all offers of solidarity and availability of various types from private individuals, religious institutes and various bodies”.
But who was Cilla and why does her memory remain alive, 50 years after her death? The passages from her school diary, the letters to friends, the testimonies of those who knew her directly or through her writings, the Association named after her, «they reveal in her the existence of a human and Christian maturity, full of decision, courage and provocation in times marked by a strong process of homologation», highlight Adriano Moraglioone of the girl’s last friends, whom she met a month before she died.
On 5 July in Montemagno, in the province of Asti, Cilla’s relatives and friends met for a day on the theme “You preferred me – A party to discover something greater in everyday life”. Rubbettino editore published the book The people of Cilla. When something bigger enters everyday life (pp. 130, €15.00), re-edition and updating of texts written over the years by Moraglio and the journalist Don Primo Soldi, of the diocese of Turin. The diocesan phase of the girl’s beatification process ended on May 14. «Cilla reverberates her life in God within an extraordinary number of experiences of conversion, resuscitation of faith, impulses and undertakings of charity», wrote Don Luigi Giussani in 1984 in the preface to the book by Orazio Zacco and Rino Galeazzi Eight years with Cilla (Elledici).
