The small apartment at No. 2, Piazza Cappuccini, where Chiara went to live with some of her first companions from the autumn of 1944, was simply called the “little house.” However, that small group of girls shared, in that two-room apartment, an intense life of communion, of intimate unity with God and with each other, open to those neighbours, starting with the poorest, whom the Gospel teaches us to prefer. Giving meaning to this living together is the presence of Jesus, who sustains and enlightens and who, known in his highest expression of crucified and Forsaken love, directs them in their relationships with each other and with those they meet. “And there we began to live this spirit that I was beginning to glimpse, what we have to do: live the Gospel, love, then we would focus especially on love. And we began to live it that way. That was our happiness. We, of course, were available to all those in the war: the women left without their children, or especially the maimed, the sick, the hungry, we were always around the city helping everybody, and then we came home. The one who gave meaning to our living was precisely the presence of Christ spiritually in our midst.” The Gospel, lived in the light of the charism of unity, urges us above all to love and, as a concrete expression of fraternal love, leads to the pooling of material goods: time, listening, surplus and sometimes even necessities.

Every day were new discoveries in the Gospel, which had now become our only book, our only light of life.

We understood clearly that in love there is everything, that mutual love “had to” form Jesus’ final call to the souls who had followed him, that “being consumed in one” could not but be Jesus’ last prayer to the Father, the supreme synthesis of the Good News.

Jesus knew that the Most Holy Trinity was eternal bliss, and he, God-Man who came down to redeem humanity, wanted to draw all those he loved into the com-Unity of the Three.

That was his homeland, that was the homeland of the brothers he had loved to the point of blood.

“Consume us in one”: that was the program of our life in order to love him.

But where two or more are united in His name, He is in the midst of them. We felt it, His divine presence, whenever unity triumphed over our rebellious natures to die: the presence of His light, of His love, of His strength.

[…] And we said from the very beginning, “Yes, the Gospel is the solution to every individual problem and every social problem.”

It was for us, made one heart, one mind; it could be for more, for all[1].

Others entered this vital dynamic. Palmira Frizzera, wanting to get to know more about these girls who were now well known in the provincial town, went to the little house and from the first time she enters the small apartment, she recalls that “in Piazza Cappuccini, you entered the kitchen right away, then a door on the right and one on the left, that’s it. In the door on the right was the room where Chiara slept. Bed frames on the floor and a large painting of Jesus abandoned. On these frames were little mats with covers with colourful little flowers on them, all nicely cleaned and cared for. And I said, what? You live here and you didn’t tell me? And I said: I’m not leaving here anymore.”

Marco Tecilla, first focolarino, went to the little house almost every day to repair something: the small stove to be fixed, a fault in the electrical system. He lived not far from Piazza Cappuccini and knew how to do those jobs. “I would always arrive at dinner time and hear the conversation of these girls. There was Chiara, Graziella, Giosi, Natalia, Vit, Aletta… I was very struck by what Chiara’s said, it was always related to the Gospel, the Word of Life, Jesus, Mary, topics that really struck me. I was breathing this supernatural atmosphere.”

Giosi Guella, originally from a town in the upper Garda area, remembers those early days, “When I arrived at Piazza Cappuccini, with lunch prepared by my mother, one day there was Angelella, and she said, come with me to visit one of my poor people and let’s bring your lunch with us. We went into a room with a bed and an old woman there. As Angelella came in, she went to this poor woman and hugged her and said to me, “It’s Jesus. The poor people were just Jesus.”

Aldo Stedile, who with Marco Tecilla and two other young men in 1948 started the first men’s focolare, confides, “We understood that this new Ideal had to make us one soul. It was not easy, because we were different, our character was different, however, slowly, through continuous exercise, also through the falls, the mistakes, slowly we really became one soul. […] Of course, we did not live just for ourselves, we lived for a whole community that in the meantime had formed in the city.”

Attentive to the needs that the world around us, the life of the focolare is a simple, intimate and open life of union and relationship, with God and neighbour. The name focolare came later, but the “little house” in Piazza Cappuccini is the place where that particular element to which Chiara aspired began to be realized when she felt that “if on the one hand the vocation to a consecration to God, as can happen for example in a monastery, seemed beautiful to me, more beautiful still would have seemed to me a consecration to God, a dedication to God, a contemplation of God by being in the midst of the world. “[2]