Born in Minturno (Latina) on June 27, 1877.
Died in Rome on January 13, 1946.
A Somascan religious from the age of fourteen, he was ordained a priest in 1902. Literate and writer, "father of the blind" of the Sant'Alessio Institute on the Aventine Hill, he was to be provost general of his order from 1926 to 1932.
Father Zambarelli, a young priest, met Don Guanella two years before the consecration of the *church of S. Giuseppe al Trionfale when, going on an errand to Monte Mario, he was "co-opted" by Don Luigi as helper for the blessing of the first improvised oratory in that poor neighborhood. Another time Don Guanella reproached him for not having turned to him for the shelter of a poor old woman over eighty years of age who was almost blind and in poor health, to fix which the Somascan religious had had to look for months and months for a place in Roman almshouses. . Father Zambarelli concluded his testimony to the beatification process by observing that from the words and attitude of Don Guanella «one would almost have said that he was a priest of few numbers because he knew how to conceal both his doctrine and his profound virtue under the veil of true Christian humility".
Sources:
ITALO LARACCA, P. Luigi Zambarelli (from his letters), Rome, Tip. Mario Scopel, 1966.
GIOVANNI ZAMBARELLI, Luigi Zambarelli priest and poet in his intimate and family life, Velletri, 1971, pp. 25-26.
Guanellian sources:
Archive of the Center for Guanellian Studies, Postulation, Beatificationis et canonizationis Servi Dei Aloysii Guanella. Public copy of the ordinary Milan trial, ff. 1849-1852.
ALEJANDRO DIEGUEZ, Don Luigi Guanella and the religious of other institutes, in Don Guanella and Rome. One hundred years of the presence of the Opera 1903-2003, edited by Francesca Bucci and Fabrizio Fabrizi, Rome, Nuove Frontiere, 2004, pp. 247-248.
Photographs:
GIOVANNI ZAMBARELLI, Luigi Zambarelli..., p. 13.
«Vita Somasca», October-December 1995, p. 17.