This is the story of Giulia Gabrieli, 14 years old, who had cancer. First of all, I want you to know that Giulia made it. She did not recover from her illness, this is true: she died on August, 19th, in the evening, at home in the San Tomaso de’ Calvi district in

Bergamo, while, during the WYD (Word Youth Day) in Madrid, the young people were concluding the Way of the Cross.

Yet, she made it.

 She managed to transform her 2-year-long illness into a hymn to life in a spiritual growth which led her to weave a dialogue with her death:

“I know now that my story may end in two ways: or thanks to a miracle, in a complete recovery, for which I ask the Lord since I have many plans to achieve. And I want to achieve them myself. Or by going towards my Lord, which is a beautiful thing.

They are both happy endings. The most important thing is, as the Blessed

Chiara Luce says, that God’s will be done. 

Giulia was like that: with the lightness of her age, she used to say these huge things which seem unutterable to us, trembling adults.
Yet she was an ordinary girl. In fact, she often asserted her normality: she was beautiful, sunny and genuinely theatrical, she loved travelling, nice clothes and she loved shopping. She was an explosion of refined vitality, which her disease, mysteriously, did not diminish, but amplified.