St. Pier Giorgio Frassati

Who they were

Pier Giorgio was the son of Turin's elite. His father founded the newspaper La Stampa and served as a senator and ambassador, and he wore the privilege lightly and spent it entirely.

He was an engineering student of average grades and enormous life: mountains above all, and the famous photograph shows him with a pipe in his teeth on a rockface, captioned in his own hand verso l'alto, to the heights. There was politics, including public brawls with both fascist thugs and anticlerical mobs, and pranks, and friendship. And there was a parallel life almost no one knew: daily Mass, the rosary, which friends said you could not walk far with him without being drafted into, and years of St. Vincent de Paul Society visits through Turin's worst tenements, giving away his allowance, his bus fare so that he ran home, and once his shoes. In July 1925 he contracted fulminant polio, likely from the sick he visited, and with his family distracted by his grandmother's death in the same house he was gravely ill before anyone noticed. He died in six days, at twenty four, scribbling with a paralyzed hand a last note about medicine for a poor man named Converso. Then Turin's poor came to the funeral in their thousands, and his parents discovered who their son had been. He was canonized in September 2025, together with Carlo Acutis.

Why people turn to St. Pier Giorgio Frassati

Young adults, alongside Carlo Acutis: the analogue to Carlo's digital, made of the trailhead, the friend group, and hidden mercy. Athletes and climbers have the photograph. Everyone has verso l'alto.

How to ask their intercession

Borrow his practice directly. Draft a friend into one decade this week, and do one act of mercy nobody will discover.