BORGI, GIOVANNI, known as TATA. – Master mason, guardian of orphans. Born in Rome on 18 Feb. 1732, died there on 28 June 1798. Most pious and ardent in charity, in his spare hours from work he would go to serve the sick at the Hospital of S. Spirito. One evening in October 1784, passing through the Piazza del Pantheon, he noticed on the pavement some wretched children sleeping. Moved with pity, he carried one of them—a child bereft of parents and everything—back to his own ground-floor room in Vicolo dei Cartari, where soon the family of abandoned orphans he had gathered grew in number. To meet their increasing needs he took on extra hours of work; and in the workshops of the popular quarter of Chiesa Nuova he placed the boys, who called him “Tata,” meaning “Dad.” The institution began to take firm shape when Monsignor Di Pietro rented, for the community, a floor of Palazzo Ruggia in Via Giulia, and Pope Pius VI subsequently acquired the entire palace for the new hospice, which after ten years housed ninety residents. In February 1798, when Rome was occupied by the revolutionary French armies, Palazzo Ruggia was confiscated and the hospice ordered to vacate or pay rent; but Tata Giovanni did not survive this blow, and a few months later he died suddenly of apoplexy.
Yet his charitable institution did not perish. With help from the Popes and, after 1870, also from the Italian government, after various vicissitudes and changes of location it found in 1926 its definitive home in a building of its own on Viale Ardeatino outside Porta S. Paolo, and by Royal Decree of 21 March 1935 its statutes were approved, at which point it officially took the name Istituto della Santissima Assunta and the character of a vocational school.