Sr. Saveria, of the Daughters of St. Camillus, reached the age of ninety this year. She spent sixty years of her life caring for the sick in the ‘Madre Giuseppina Vannini’ Hospital of Rome. Two years ago she was no longer able to direct the physiotherapy department of which she had been the director for twenty years because her knees gave way and since the replacement surgery she has always had to walk with the help of crutches. She does not spare her efforts, however, when people come to ask her for her moral and spiritual support, she prays with all the patients, with whom she often says the rosary, and she prays with them if they call her from the wards.

And that is not all: Sr. Saveria navigates every day on internet. She follows the site of the Curia, www.camilliani.org, and the site on the fourth centenary, www.camillodelellis.org, as well and she is the author of some of the contents of the site of the Daughters of St. Camillus, ‘With the Heart of a  Mother’ (http://concuoredimadre.blogspot.it)!

The religious life of Saveria began in 1945 when she joined the Institute founded by the Camillian Blesseds, Mother Giuseppina Vannini and Father Luigi Tezza. After a period of very great inner crisis she confided in her parish priest who exhorted her to turn for the whole of the month of October to Our Lady. At the end of the month Saveria felt in her own heart a voice that invited here to follow the Virgin Mary so as to rediscover peace.

This was the call to religious life. Advised by a friend of hers who was a Daughter of St. Camillus, she entered the Institute and since then Sister Saveria has always been followed spiritually by Camillian fathers

‘When I put on my religious habit’, says Sister Saveria, ‘I felt full of joy; not even a queen has ever felt as much joy as I did in putting on the habit of St. Camillus with its red cross. And I still have it’.

Born in Veneto, after her postulate in San Giuliano (Verona) and her formation at San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, she entered the House of the Daughters of St. Camillus which adjoined the Vannini Hospital, all of whose changes she has witnessed: from being a home for elderly people to being a polyclinic and a clinic for surgery

Sister Saveria speaks in a proud way about the Founders of the Daughters of St. Camillus, remembering the adversity they had to address and their firmness in carrying the cross in full acceptance of the will of God and her first spiritual fathers. And she remembers with joy the numerous graces and healings through the intercession of St. Camillus de Lellis that she has witnessed down the years and all those sick people whom she has always supported corporeally and spiritually, following the charism of the Giant of Charity.

A life devoted to caring for the sick and to Christian faith, a crystalline example of the Camillian charism: long live Sister Saveria!