ALESSANDRINO MAZZUCCHI was born in Pianello on 26 April 1878 when Don Carlo Coppini was still parish priest in the village, three years before Don Luigi Guanella arrived there to take over the work and continue it. He was the second child of Natale and Domenica Mazzucchi; her first daughter was a two-year-old girl, also from Alexandria in homage to her paternal grandfather who lived in the house with his son and daughter-in-law. But Alexandrina died shortly after, at the age of four, leaving great regret like her as a good and intelligent child.
Little Alessandro was followed two years later by his little brother Salvatore who went with him to Como to study, but not because he wanted to be a priest; instead he became a highly esteemed doctor and notary in Como, Dongo and in the notary college of Appiano Gentile. In 1883 the fourth child, Leonardo, arrived: at the age of five his older brothers left, at the age of seven his father died and Alessandrino remained with his good and strong mother "martyrella of love of pain", as Don Guanella called her.
Father Natale's family had already been marked by other difficulties as well: wealthy, the Mazzucchis had gone through difficult moments due to a failed trust action against them.
A relative took advantage of the trust, speculating on all the money entrusted to him in administration; he went bankrupt and left for America without giving any more news.
The Mazzucchis saved the land that remained under their administration, but the young Natale had to suspend his secondary studies begun in Milan to receive from an uncle and manage a shop-tavern in the village. He also became nervous and a little irascible, preoccupied and weakened in health, so that at the first somewhat substantial ailment his fiber almost suddenly gave way. However for Alessandrino's family these previous stories did not mean poverty, but moments of difficulty and tension, which the kindness of his wife and children could not always contain.
In this environment, so common and a little sad, Alessandrino's happy and serene kindness blossomed, of which different but concordant testimonies have survived from his mother, his younger brother, Leonardo, as well as from the parish priest Don Guanella, the masters of Pianello and from Como, of his educators from Como, as well as of old schoolmates who, questioned many years later, still remembered with freshness the face and example of his fellow pupil at the school of S. Filippo.
The environment of the house, shop and inn in the village worried his mother who kept him away from the place and advised him to stay at home quietly and collected; and the child got used to controlling himself and avoiding dangers.
Then a certain severity of religious education, while it tended to delay Communion, led instead to anticipate Confession. At the age of five from Alexandria he began to go to school and the teacher immediately prepared him for the first confession which then became monthly, the religious and moral sensitivity of the child had reason to grow intensely.
At the age of five he was ready to go to school with the good teacher of the village Giuseppina Lombardini of Morbegno; at the age of eight he passed the completion exams, i.e. third grade, to the admiration of the didactic director of Como, Mr. Cattaneo. His mother advised him to study and he, looking at her with her serene and wide-open eyes, laughed and laughed; because one reading was enough for him to learn his lesson very well. He learned to write, for fun, correctly both with the right hand and with the left; and he laughed about it. His companions called him "apron" because he always wore a large apron; but he knew how to accept jokes without taking offense, so that they soon left her in peace…
He loved to draw; simple, clean designs; houses, gardens, mountains, people and often churches and chapels with altar boys. And he continued with his exemplary and serene demeanor, stimulating even for his restless little companions.
One day Don Guanella, after a fervent sermon on the priesthood, met Alessandrino and his companions and stopping for a moment, he took off his hat, placed it on Alessandrino's head saying: “Would you like it like this? Would you like to become a priest?”. As soon as he arrived home, still excited, he told his mother: “The parish priest wanted to try his hat on my head, saying if I wanted to become a priest! Oh, if I could!" And that time he cried.
It was therefore decided to send him to the Little House of Providence of Don Guanella, where he could study. On 26 August 1888 Alessandrino Mazzucchi, with his mother and younger brother Salvatore, arrived from Pianello in Como, in the Piccola Casa della Provvidenza. He was the first boy who, as a seminarian, inaugurated the small seminary that Don Guanella had already hoped to establish first in Chiavenna or Campodolcino, fifteen years earlier, and which he had then somehow started in Traona in 1880-81, immediately closed by prefect of Sondrio.
From this day and for almost two years, the stories of Alessandrino and the Piccola Casa come together, because this now becomes the boy's definitive home and family. He remained there making himself esteemed and well-liked for his cheerfulness, amiability, love for the Eucharist and for his delicate charity towards the suffering guests hosted in the House. It was precisely an act of generosity towards a sick companion that was at the origin of his sudden and premature death on 21 June 1890 on the feast of San Luigi Gonzaga.
The spiritual legacy of Alessandrino Mazzucchi
- A boy in love with life, with beauty, with simple things; appreciated and sought after as a companion in games and commitments both at home and in the parish.
- A mature boy who knew how to give God the right space in his life: faithful to prayer and daily Mass. He was a teacher to his brothers and friends in praying the rosary and in participating early in the morning, every day of the year, in Holy Mass from which he drew the joy and strength to be happy and available to everyone.
- An enthusiastic boy and ready to serve others to the point of heroism. His death on St. Louis' day could perhaps have been avoided if he had stayed with his mother who came especially to be with him and the "sense of duty" had not prevailed in the service of charity towards the patients of the Piccola Casa della Divina Provvidenza in Como . A boy who has been able to make such a choice, even postponing the bonds of affection from his mother to be with a sick person, can only be in profound harmony with the Good Samaritan par excellence, Christ the Lord. Blessed Cardinal Ferrari loved to recommend Alessandrino as a model to the boys of the Como house: "You of the House of Divine Providence have him as dear as a treasure".
Alessandrino Mazzucchi's path to holiness
His life, one could define, is history, almost the haloed portrait of a boy who knew how to combine almost all the traits of precocious goodness without flaws, in a picture of natural qualities and grace that amazed all those who were neighbors and heard of it from direct witnesses. A light without shadows, he would say, if one weren't afraid of exaggerating or overdoing it. But also nothing exceptional or strange, except that many qualities accumulate together in a slender and regular little person, more often in the others divided among several people.
"She had an open physiognomy, a rather frail constitution; her beautiful candid and oblong face; her large, laughing and serene eyes, which looked at you with attentive innocence; her innocence and uncommon intelligence shone through, her tender and warm affectionateness...
He was not one of those insipid children who stay there, stuffed up and àpati, and are called good, because they have neither life nor spirit and never move; indeed, he was lively in spirit; of perspicacious and ready intelligence already in evidence from the first years of childhood”.
Her virtue was also precocious: a virtue blossomed and brought ever forward by grace, but also reflected and mature in an orderly behavior in its spontaneous frankness and simplicity, to strike anyone who observed it.
And in the village, they said, pointing to it as they passed: “L'è 'l Sandrin di Mazucch!”. He was struck by his joy and his open, clean laughter.
He had a deep sense of God, he felt him close, like a friend to whom he could turn and talk to him, pray to him at length; he became a teacher of prayer for his little brothers and at Christmas he sometimes made fun of this six or seven year old "priest".
He felt in the company of angels and saints and it seemed to him that they were praying with him. The child was already living in Heaven… .then he also taught his younger brothers to pray. Leonardo remembered how one day he had taught him the Salve Regina in Latin: he was four or five years old and Alessandrino was nine or ten, a Latin master. Arriving almost at the end, at the words “post hoc exilium”: “I stopped: post hoc … post hoc …: I didn't want to believe that there were such strange words in the Salve Regina. And he is indefatigable: post hoc! post hoc!, and he insisted on telling me to go ahead and repeat, which was right. I was not persuaded until I opened the window and questioned my mother, who was downstairs in the kitchen. When he answered that it was right, I persuaded myself”.
Naturally, a boy like this had ended up in the group of altar servers of Don Guanella's parish and was faithful to his duty and to his shifts even on weekdays. In that era without evening television, without electric light and with work schedules of ten hours a day, the rhythms of life were different; many who wanted to go to Mass even on weekdays, before work, had to get up very early and Mass followed the Ave Maria signal in the morning (in summer it was at four o'clock) and Alessandrino begged his parents and mother above all because they woke him up and let him go to Mass; he recited his almost perfect Latin, even in the psalms and at the readings, when there was the officiation of the dead or Sunday vespers.
Don Guanella observed him in catechism, attentive and always ready to explain, to repeat, to ask; he saw him at the oratory, cheerful, lively, likeable: he ran, laughed, jumped, played ball with admirable dexterity, in that large meadow near the parish church. They went to the lake, climbed the mountains, playing, singing; people commented: "that Christmas son has a particular air so nice and dear: he is really an extraordinary son!" . And Don Guanella too had to agree: no, that son was not strange and abnormal, he was truly extraordinary.
In the Little House of Providence it was the custom to make one day every month, the exercise for a happy death; then that there were only a few, each one chose the day he wanted and Alessandrino had chosen the 21st of each month in honor of his dear San Luigi. He used to repeat: "Oh, how I would like to die as St. Louis died: on St. Louis' day!".
On that day - June 21, 1890 - the feast of St. Luigi Gonzaga, the name day of Don Guanella was celebrated. There was also his mother who had come to visit him, but he still wanted to eat among the patients.
“Lunch time came. A separate lunch had been prepared for Signora Domenica and her children; but Alessandrino begged his mother so much that she obtained permission to keep good Lino (Crosta) company on that day as well. His golden heart was sorry to leave the poor fellow alone and sad, precisely on that day when everyone was happy and happy. With the promise, therefore, to return soon to his mother, the young man flew to his dear Lino and began to eat with him, although he felt more difficulty and repugnance than usual in swallowing the food, nevertheless, making an effort and conquering himself, he managed to swallow his portion. But in the end, unable to take it any longer from the physical upheaval, he said to his companion: 'Are you happy, I'm going to play a bit on the swing, to see if I can digest better and then I'll go back to my mum, what's waiting for me?'. To which the comrade immediately consented".
Friends invited him to play together and then to get on the swing. “He made the sign of the holy cross and mounted it, holding on tightly to the ropes; a certain Bianchi di Spurano gave him the push and lifted him high. Burdened in the stomach and in the head by the food he had just eaten and by the nauseating smell near Crosta, a sudden dizziness assailed him and he was seen to abandon the ropes, topple back and fall from above onto the ground, hitting his cerebellum hard on it. It was a scare! Immediately collected, unconscious and bloodied, he was he, by a certain Domenico printer, carried in his arms into a small room and placed on a small sofa. Put under the pillow, there remained a large stain of blood. Don Luigi, warned, rushed to his dear and favorite son, gave the boy conditional sacramental absolution and went in search of his mother, to prepare her, with all delicacy and prudence for the very sad news. 'I am sorry to disturb you, Domenica: our Alessandrino is not feeling well!'. The woman was amazed; then she, suddenly, exclaimed: He's dead, he's dead! ”. In fact, Alessandrino died the same evening, at the age of just over 12.
"Don Guanella, who suffered so much in seeing that dear little son, a very promising hope for him, taken away from him, often remembered him and spoke of him with more heartfelt regret, exclaiming: 'Ah, he was really a chosen little flower and the Lord wanted to bring him in heaven! Fiat voluntas Dei!'. And he proposed him as a model to everyone, narrating his singular traits of virtue and piety. The Sisters also kept her memory and admiration alive in their hearts”.
And it was again Don Guanella who had the following engraved on the tombstone in the Pianello cemetery (later replaced by another for all the dead of the family), under the epigraph of Father Natale Mazzucchi: "The Alessandrino son - in the smile of 'innocence - full of particular gifts - of nature and grace - at the age of 12 flew to Heaven - June 21, 1890 - in the lap of the beloved parent. The biographer comments: "in this clear, sober and eloquent epigraph a saint sums up the life and virtues of another little saint very well".
 Alessandrino Mazzucchi.pdf |