I took you as mine

Who was Enzo Piccinini? To look at him from the outside, he was a ‘phenomenon of nature’, a man who slept little, travelled a lot, worked hard, had strong passions, entered into the lives of others, a courageous and provocative man… And yet, behind all this, for those who had the opportunity to peek inside the phenomenon, there emerged a man who was totally enthusiastic because he was radically embraced and, for this reason, infinitely generous. His temperament and indomitable character, moved by the ‘only thing that counts’, ‘the divine restlessness of unfulfilled souls’, had found their most congenial environment in the encounter with an integrally human, ‘carnal’ Christian experience: Hence, an explosive mixture that progressively took away from the ‘spectacular’ aspects to leave more and more room for what excited him, the embrace of Christ, which had arrived overwhelmingly in his life through his unique friendship with Father Luigi Giussani: an encounter ‘that had changed his countenance even of certain traits of temperament, others by exalting them’.

The exhibition aims to offer an insight into some central aspects that characterised Enzo’s life:

1. The heart as a search for the destiny of everything and a factor of unity in life
2. The “event of friendship” as the continuous discovery of Someone who esteems you as you are
3. The disruptive outcome of a life without measure because sown by truth
4. The discovery that the heart of life is the offering of self.

Fondazione Enzo Piccinini