Padri Scolopi Chiavari

Since the time of the Founder Giuseppe Calasanzio, the Pious Schools in Italy were organized in Provinces: Roman, Ligurian, Neapolitan and Tuscan. The Pious Schools spread rapidly in the different regions, we should say in the different States in which the Peninsula was then divided. Later also other provinces were born: the Sardinian, the Apulian, the Sicula. They were other times and other historical situations. With ups and downs the Piarist Fathers from 1600 to today have continued their educational work. The juridical divisions of the past have enriched the Calasanctian testimony, developing an exceptional creativity in the variegated service to children and young people. All of this constitutes for us a patrimony of culture, of science, of pedagogical knowledge, of fidelity to the uncommon charism, of which we are today the depositories and responsible before the Church and society. In recent years, the changed historical situations have led the Italian Pious Schools to carry out a slow and not easy process of unification. For a long time, in local and national meetings, the historical need to overcome the juridical division of the four Provinces was discussed, by merging them into a single Italian Province of the Piarist Fathers. The wealth of experiences of the single became so everyone's heritage. But the Italian peninsula is long and the kilometers between Genoa, Milan and the Community of Campi Salentina are many. Overcoming this distance, made not only of kilometers but also of stories, personal sensitivities and secular traditions was, and still is, neither an easy nor a brief undertaking; but it was worthwhile to face it in the name of God and in the conviction that to unite us institutionally was and is the only and identical charisma