BROTHER FRANCESCO FOGLIOTTI
Franxesco Fogliotti was born in Naples in 1911. After his novitiate and profession (1 November 1928) at La Moglia he left Italy for Patagonia where he studied and then completed his tirocinium at Fortin Mercedes and at Bahia Blanca. He returned to Italy for further studies and was later transferred to the Ligure-Toscana Province as a brother in 1937. He worked at Vallecrosia, at Sampierdarena and La Spezia. He returned to Sampierdarena in 1949 and remained there until his death in 1999.
Turning over the pages of the scholastic registers of the Salesian College in Sampierdarena, and reading the entries from the 1940’s to the 1980’s, it can be found that Brother Francesco Fogliotti taught school for 36 to 40 hours a week. A normal teaching load of 18 hours of Mathematics and Physics is considered very heavy; well, he used to teach double those hours. The other teachers would have been far from amused had he suggested to them that they do likewise, but he never gave in to the temptation to show others just how busy he was.
Brother Fogliotti was happy to work, to teach, to have students in front of him, students who grew up with a sound knowledge of the two difficult subjects of physics and mathematics. He was a committed specialist and an outstanding teacher of the two subjects. It was for him an expression of his love for Don Bosco, for young people and for science itself. For him teaching was more a pleasure than a burden, such a pleasure that he never tired of it. And if he did feel tired, he loved that very tiredness just the same. Saint Augustine used to say similar things about a man and his work in the various fields of his life. Fogliotto totally agreed.
FULL TIME CERTAINLY.
Looking at the way he behaved in front of the boys, the way he lived his Salesian life, the way he practised his life in community, it becomes clear that Francesco Fogliotti was an extraordinary man and an extraordinary Salesian. He was almost 90 years old when he died. He was a great patriarch, a great teacher, a great educator. He began his career when he was 26 in Vallecrosia in 1937. Apart from a short stint in La Spezia he spent the rest of his life in Sampierdarena. When he was given his teacher’s registration in 1940, those who had come to assess his classroom teaching expressed their profound admiration. He was able to make difficult matters seem easy, a precious art not known to many.
Brother Fogliotto taught Mathematics to more than 400 boys in the school. He was the only teacher of the subject for ten to twelve classes. The 40 hours became 48 when the higher classes were added. In these days of unionism it would be embarrassing to note these exaggerations were it not for the great dignity and simplicity with which Francis lived them. It was all normal and natural for him; for six days a week he taught for six, seven or even eight hours a day.
He could be seen going from one classroom to the next with a pile of corrected exercise books and coming out with a similar pile to correct. In one pocket of his dustcoat he had his supply of chalk, in the other a cloth to clean the blackboard. He was like an assembly line, exact and without interruptions. “The teacher is coming”, the students used to say. Not “Fogliotti is coming”. He was the teacher par excellence.
A SALESIAN PYTHAGORAS.
We are used to speaking of Salesian religious brothers as people who instruct students in their trade, people who are in charge of workshops, teachers of applied technology, physical education instructors. Here we are speaking of one who during his whole life has taught the most difficult disciplines of mathematics and physics, with a naturalness and a passion similar to the ancient Greek philosophers who dealt with these same topics. It was natural that the boys, instinctively, had given him the nickname of Pythagoras, the name of the one who had laid the foundations for mathematical science.
Outside school Pythagoras became Francesco, an amiable man, smiling, serene and humble. Nor are these wasted adjectives when applied to him. On the contrary, he showed nothing of the renown bestowed on him from outside, nothing of the respect his past pupils had for him, even of those who had climbed the social ladder, ministers, members of parliament, teachers at high schools, professors in universities who sought his collaboration with the Scientific Review of Mathematics and who appreciated his exact and surprising solutions.
To stop talking about Brother Fogliotto at this point would be a big mistake. It must be added that he was an exemplary Salesian among some thirty lay religious; that was how many there were in Sampierdarena during the heyday of the brothers from 1945 to 1965, and not all of them were exemplary. There are exceptions even in the best of families.
Francesco was the personification of consistency in his conviction of faith and his fidelity to his religious practices. He was a mirror of a faith lived day after day, of Salesian work ethos practised without escape, without digression. He lived the Salesian Preventive System in a natural way by being present in the playground, amidst the boys, in the recreations, even during the games, in conversations, by being in the midst of them always whenever he could, and this seemed to be always.
FURTHER GIFTS.
In the last ten years of his life when he was more that 80 years old it was not logical for him to keep on teaching (maybe if it had depended on him he would have liked to carry on until the day that he died), but he remained among the boys, ready, whenever needed, to give private tuition and help with explanations. He was a Salesian with a high moral, spiritual, human and professional stature.
Francesco was also a musician of note. He had come to Sampierdarena in 1949, and Brother Marius Charamel was happy to entrust him with the teaching of the Schola Cantorum of the Institute and the preparation of the musical operettas, which in Salesian houses were the happiest moments on the occasion of the traditional Salesian feasts such as the Immaculate Conception and Mary Help of Christians. In Sampierdarena many people enjoyed the regular playing on the piano, harmonium, and organ of the professor of Mathematics.
After 61 years Fogliotto had the happiness of opening the pages of the exercise book with the notes on Trigonometry which he had given to a group of seminarians who wanted to sit for their Matriculation examinations the year after. They were given some ten lessons in the summer of 1942 after a year of work, school, study and of danger at Sampierdarena where there were more than sixty Salesians and over 500 boarders.
(Antonio Mischio in Bollettino Salesiano - February 2004. Translated by Fr Tony Moester.)
4