Vacation

A Splendid Summer and the
Encounter of a Life
The beginning of the Rimini community in the Romagna Region of Italy happened when some GS tourists encountered some young people from the area. It was the early 1960s, and the seaside was startled by a completely new way of vacationing.
The “raggio” (meeting), the outings to San Leo, and the chats under the beach umbrella, in the recollections of a woman who was a teenager at the time

by Paola Ronconi

July 24, 1962, morning: “Dear Diary: At times, it seems like I’m wasting my life, but I need help so badly! I’m becoming mean-spirited; it’s that I feel like everything, every problem, every responsibility is growing gigantic around me, and so I try to close myself in, to listen to nothing… I find myself feeling more and more tired and disoriented.” On the same page, July 25th, 8:30: “I’m happy. Today, when I should have been angrier than ever, I feel happy… Yesterday, I went to San Leo with Alba, Fr. Giancarlo, Cicci, Mariangela, and Luigi to meet a group of Student Youth from Milan. I learned many things, and I understood what my place is.”
What happened that afternoon of July 24, 1962?

A cancelled meeting
Holding the diary of her youth of forty years ago, Marina Valmaggi says, “Rimini, the early 1960s… In the summer, I used to go dancing, play volleyball, and sail. I had gone through the whole ‘assembly line’ of Catholic Action, but had left it because the girls’ section was as boring and disconnected from real life as it could be.” A slightly different way of spending her endless summer hours was offered by the cultural initiatives of the “Rimini Students’ Club,” hosted in the diocesan House for Youth Studies. A meeting on Bernanos had been scheduled for that July 24th afternoon. “I decided to go out of spite, as I was very offended that I hadn’t been invited to a party. We were waiting for the speaker, but got a call telling us that her car had broken down. The meeting was cancelled! Fr. Giancarlo Ugolini, who was also there for the conference, told us that that morning a group of young people had come to the club to copy some flyers about an outing to the San Leo Castle for that very afternoon. Since the meeting was cancelled, and Fr. Giancarlo had a car, six of us decided to go meet ‘the kids with the flyers.’ At San Leo, we found about thirty young people sitting on the grass, singing, at the foot of the castle. It was wonderful! The song, which I later learned, was Hymn to the Assisi Sentries. It was as if they were saying to us, ‘Come on! Wake up! We’re here for you!’ Then they started talking among themselves. They were preparing something called a raggio on the subject of ‘communion.’ I was sitting there listening. They were talking about concrete experience. Then they sang some more. A young guy with a guitar in hand–Claudio Chieffo–said, ‘I wrote this song describing my Christian experience.’ I was dumbfounded. In those years, a songwriter was a god. As soon as he finished singing, they surrounded us and bombarded us with questions, asking our names, and if we’d like to go to the beach with them the next day.”

Everybody to the beach
Who were those young people, whose simple singing and talking so fascinated Marina? They were the GS members of Milan, each of whom had gone on his own vacation on the Romagna Riviera. Before leaving, they had agreed to meet the Forlì GS kids every Thursday at 4 p.m. at the Rimini House for Youth Studies for a raggio and some time together. All of them would have turned themselves inside out not to miss one of these appointments, even resorting to hitchhiking if necessary.
The next day, the meeting with these new friends was at the beach in Viserba. “For those of Rimini, Viserba was only for tourists!” Marina and her group showed up at the meeting. Also present was a certain Pippo Molino, a “little guy,” a freshman, who pulled out a piece of paper under the beach umbrella and called everyone to get ready for the raggio. Then, later, out on the breakwater, they prayed Lauds. “I had recited it sometimes, in Latin, at the parish youth club, but they had a different way of praying. Then we played ‘spazzola’ in the water, and ‘capture the flag’–things I hadn’t done since middle school! Even chatting under the beach umbrella was different. With them, just talking together was a way of comparing experiences, being interested in the other person, not in a mechanical or pedantic way. I was used to going to the beach; I lived there, after all, but that day was a real revolution for me!”
It might have ended there, a lovely summer you remember with nostalgia as you look at photos. But instead, “They literally vanquished us, and once we returned home, we wrote each other and told each other what we were living (in those years, the telephone was used very little, because it cost too much).”

Mountains of letters
Marina shows me a stack of letters from those days, many from Claudio Chieffo, in which, next to sentences of typical teenagers you can still read: “Remember to pray. I pray ten Hail Marys every evening, one for me, one for my father, one for the Council, one for Fr. Giussani, one for the GS of Rimini…don’t be afraid to believe; God never gets tired.” In another: “I brought five new friends, but imagine if these five brought another five each, and so on?!” It was the idea of the first Christians. Each one was responsible for those he had encountered. In fact, in the following months, the Rimini kids were invited to all the gestures organized by the Forlì community, like the “six days” in Campigna, and Adriana Mascagni’s concert at the Apollo Theater in Forlì. In October, GS was born in Rimini. “We also took every occasion to talk about this new friendship, and one day we said, ‘That’s enough, we’ll tell everyone!’ We organized a GS day at Villa Verde and, at Christmas that year, three days of vacation together in Verucchio. Bit by bit, we ‘imported’ a method, but the most important thing was the personal relationship.”
From then on, a series of events followed one after the other: the beginning of a charitable work, the collection of a tithe for those on mission in Brazil, the Way of the Cross, first at Varigotti, then at the San Leo Castle. School life was also influenced. “I attended the ‘classical high school,’ where the law of the land was mors tua vita mea. Well, we couldn’t ignore our schoolmates who were failing any more, and helping them was also an opportunity for making our new friendship known. If you take life seriously, maybe you’ll have less time to study, but you’ll mature as a person. That year, nobody in my class flunked out!”

Free time
The House for Youth Studies hosted the summer raggio regularly, every Thursday at 4 p.m., until 1964. Then the work camps in the south began, fifteen days of camping in the most backward areas of southern Italy, where the GS kids went to play with the children, teach catechism, and share their day with the local people. In addition, with the GS vacations and those of the university students, the regularity of the meetings was lost.
The concept of summer as the time when you “do your own thing,” particularly in the vacation world of Rimini, transformed into the “moment when everything starts,” a “time to sow.” As Fr. Giussani said, “Who you are is revealed in your free time.”
Marina continues: “Years later, when we began to talk about ‘charism,’ a word unknown up until then, I said to myself, ‘Aha! That day, through those kids, we encountered a charism and in some way we realized it, and we never left it.’”