We live in the Magliana neighborhood, where everyone has known us for over ten years because the house that we live in now is the old house of formation. Since it became a mission house, we’ve desired that people could be able to come over more often, considering it a place of encounter and companionship.

For this reason we’ve launched ourselves into a new adventure: every morning, Tuesday through Friday, the big gate is open and whoever wants can enter to spend some time with us. Starting from Fr. Gerry’s initiative Coffee in company, talking and getting to know better the people that come to this event every week, we started some workshops: sewing, cooking, gardening, flower arrangements, and preparing the Nativity scene in the church.

Since I was little, I’ve had a passion for history and tradition: I desire that the wisdom of our parents be preserved. Here we are surrounded by people with great experience: we have seamstresses, great cooks, carpenters. In this way, in our workshops, we are the apprentices and our parishioners our masters. Together we build and share a little bit of our lives.

This is the characteristic of our workshops: we’re not the ones who teach – we learn. For each workshop, expert women teach and pass on to us what they know so that it’s not lost. In older times it was the nuns who passed on this knowledge, now the nuns try to collect and preserve it.

In the afternoon, in addition, we host high school students that want to study with us, in silence or exchanging a joke here and there if the material allows for it. It’s beautiful to see our house full of people talking and working together: among a plain stitch and a backstitch, a grill-out, a little bit of algebra and Latin, relationships are born, still to discover and deepen but already beautiful and worthy of giving thanks.

Ours is a simple life. But like one high school girl said to me quoting Chesterton: “life is the most beautiful of adventures but only the adventurer discovers it.”