FOR PIER GIORGIO FRASSATI, HIS SISTER'S WEDDING WAS A WHITE MARTYRDOM

 Pier Giorgio was very close to his younger sister, Luciana and wanted her happiness, but on her wedding day he was desolate, isolated and in torment. After her lavish wedding party, Pier Giorgio waved goodbye to her on the train platform and promptly burst into tears. Luciana was moving away, she had married a high-ranking Polish diplomat and as his wife, she was going to hop from country to country. 

Pier Giorgio had given her and her new husband a gift of an antique, ivory crucifix, but his parents had disparaged this offering, and in its place they gave Luciana an ornate silver tea set and put Pier Giorgio's name on it. His parents, Alfredo and Adelaide were quite ashamed of their Catholicity, and most especially of their fanatical only son. 

With Luciana so far away, Pier Giorgio was going to be without his closest confident and ally. Brother and sister had grown up in a wealthy, high-status family that was more like a war-zone than a haven, and they had a very close bond. Luciana was the only one that Pier Giorgio told his deepest secret, that he was in love with an orphan girl named Laura Hidalgo. Laura was clever, she was taking a degree in mathematics, but she was from a lower status than the Frassatis, and Pier Giorgio feared that his mother would never approve. 

Both his parents, but particularly his mama were hyper-competitive. His mother was a celebrated painter, and the king of Italy had bought her art. His papa, Alfredo was the founder and editor in chief of La Stampa a best-selling national newspaper in Italy. He was also boorish and bullying, and wanted his family to follow strict deadlines, he demanded they eat dinner the minute he arrived home and even a tiny delay in getting to the table meant he gave nasty verbal reprimands. Alfredo often reduced his wife to tears and she used run from the dinner table to sob alone. 

The Frassati family were revered in Turin and rolling in lire. But in the run-up to Luciana's wedding, Alfredo and Adelaide's marriage was teetering on the brink; they were in prolonged injury time. They were watching their only daughter get married while theirs was falling apart. To keep up appearances, they kept things together until Luciana had tied the knot, but then Alfredo made it known he wanted a legal separation from Adelaide, something which at the time was considered scandalous. 

Adelaide was mortified and seemed to be on the edge of having a mental collapse because she would be humiliated as the woman who was such a bad wife that her husband had left her. At this exact time, Pier Giorgio was madly in love with Laura, who was pious and lovely, as prayerful as he was, and understanding of his thirst for sanctity. He feared, however, that the gap in their social standing would prove too much for his mother's nerves, make her ill, and leave him with the choice of rejecting Laura so that his mother could recover her mental balance. 

Adelaide was snobbish, but more so exceedingly competitive and she would have seen her son's marriage to Laura as a loss. She had a most brittle personality and didn't take "losing" well, she did have a bad habit of rubbing her husband's nose in the ways in which her background was superior. 

Pier Giorgio found his sister's wedding tough because he had not been able to pursue the love of his life, and when he saw Luciana make her wedding vows, he felt sorrow that he would never be able to make the same promises to Laura. Pier Giorgio had tremendous heartache, a white martyrdom, as white as Luciana's wedding dress. He put his mama first, denied himself Laura, died to self and instead of asking her hand in holy matrimony, he threw himself into his charitable works of coming to the aid of the poor, the outcasts, the addicted and the disabled, which he kept mostly secret from his mama and papa who found his antics embarrassing. 

Six full months after Luciana got wed, Pier Giorgio contracted polio from working in a slum, and for five days he was in agony before he breathed his last on July 4th, 1925. He was only 24. This July 4th we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Pier Giorgio's birthday into Heaven. 

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The pictures used are in the public domain and Laura features in the second one, she is in the middle of the three young ladies.