Loving, generous, tireless, enlightened, rich in means, but even more so in courage and imagination, united by a tenacious faith that becomes a project of a full life dedicated to the redemption of many, adult and child, healthy and sick, living and evil. In short, a truly great END couple ante litteram!

They married in Paris in 1806, she a French aristocrat naturalized Italian (born Juliette Colbert in 1785), he Marquis Falletti di Barolo (born in Turin in 1782). In 1814 they moved to Turin, to the splendid Palazzo Barolo owned by Tancredi’s family. The palace would soon become the center of emanation for the couple’s countless initiatives and to this day it is home to the Opera Barolo, a foundation that continues, according to the testamentary wishes of Giulia, who died in 1864, the service and assistance activities that the Marchioness, together with her beloved Tancredi, had started.

It is difficult to describe in such a small space the works of charity – today we would say of solidarity and human promotion – undertaken by both of them and which earned them being declared ‘venerable’ by Pope Francis (Giulia in 2015, Tancredi in 2018). In a Turin marked by poverty, degradation, and class discrimination present in neighborhoods deprived of the necessities to live with dignity, Giulia and Tancredi understood, with courage and foresight, that the improvement of the material conditions of the last ones could not be separated from an improvement of their moral – today we would say cultural and educational – conditions through pedagogical, social and political interventions. They therefore directed, at their own expense, a good part of their initiatives to the establishment of schools for poor girls, kindergartens for the children of workers (the first work of this kind in Italy), and vocational schools dedicated mostly to women. Not only that: both did their best to help the many cholera patients in Turin (1835), and Giulia, after Tancredi’s death (1838), initiated the construction of a hospital intended for the care of disabled girls.

We could continue with the construction of a monastery to welcome victims of child prostitution and more… but we like to conclude this portrait with two initiatives that describe well the breadth of vision of our venerable spouses. Giulia, after having achieved to be locked up in the women’s prison in Turin in order to fully ascertain the inhumane treatment reserved for the inmates, drew up a new prison regulation inspired by criteria of humanity unheard of at that time, submitted it to the vote of the inmates and, approved unanimously, made it operative (1821). Tancredi, on the other hand, contributed financially to the building of Turin’s monumental cemetery (1828), the most important in the city, thus extending the venerable couple’s charitable gaze to the world of the deceased as well as the living.

https://www.operabarolo.it/