The Bambino Gesù kindergarten is 100 years old. The first three Sisters arrived in Lonate a year after its foundation, on 3 August 1925. They found a town on the border between Piedmont and Lombardy, whose industrialisation had begun since the Unification of Italy in 1860: spinning mills, cotton mills and between the two World Wars foundries and machine shops.
In 1825, the first three Sisters of Charity found Lonate Pozzolo rapidly expanding and with the need to provide working mothers and fathers with a ‘kindergarten’ to support them in the human and Christian education of their youngest children.
The Child Jesus kindergarten immediately found favour with the population and also the benevolence of the Pious Work administrators. Their way of life also helped the young girls of the parish in search of vocations, and some of them later joined the congregation.
The rich programme of celebrations also included a talk by Sister Maria Silvia D.: ‘The Sisters of Saint Jeanne Antida between past and future. Still with the nursery schools?’
Jeanne Antide had chosen to be a woman educator, a religious educator and a founding educator. Today, she asks the Sisters of Charity and the lay collaborators to be educators and evangelisers with her style of charity interpreted originally, updated and inculturated.
