Born in Nizza Monferrato (Asti) on 15 May 1842.
Died in Turin on November 23, 1927.
Welcomed in 1868 in the Turin Oratory by Don Bosco himself, he was sent by him to found the first Spanish Salesian house in Utrera in 1880. Professed since 1869, he was ordained a priest in Genoa on 12 April 1873. In 1885 he took charge of the foundation of the new house in Sarrià, near Barcelona. Called back to Italy by Don Michele Rua in 1889, he was appointed director of the women's oratory of Santa Teresa di Chieri. In 1900 he went to Zurich to assist Italian emigrants and in 1908 he moved to Lorraine to found the secretariat for emigrants in Diedenhofen (France). In 1918 he returned to Turin to live his last years in the Salesian Oratory.
Don Guanella had the opportunity to meet this Salesian, a missionary among the Italian emigrants of Zurich, at least twice: in May 1902 when returning from Coira, where he had gone to arrange with Bishop Fedele Battaglia the promotion to the major orders of four of his students , passed "from beautiful Zurich" where his clerics had made their spiritual exercises under the guidance and "warm and insinuating" preaching of Don Branda; in March 1906, writing to his brother Don Giovanni Antonio, Don Guanella affirmed that he had found his brother in Zurich and that he had enjoyed «the good he does there».
Sources:
Biographical Dictionary of the Salesians, Turin, edited by the Salesian Press Office, [1969], p. 57.
Guanellian sources:
News of the House, in «La Divina Provvidenza», 1902, p. 39.
Guanellian Letters, n. 666.
Photographs:
Salesian Central Archive of Rome.