BORGI, GIOVANNI, known as TATA. — Master builder and guardian of orphans. Born in Rome on 18 February 1732, he died there on 28 June 1798. Most devout and ardently charitable, during the hours free from his work he went to render services to the sick in the hospital of S. Spirito. One evening in October 1784, as he was passing through the Piazza del Pantheon, he caught sight of some wretched children sleeping on the pavement. Moved with compassion, he took one of them, deprived of parents and everything else, to his ground-floor hovel in the Vicolo dei Cartari, where the family of derelict orphans whom he had taken in soon grew in number. To meet their increased needs he imposed on himself a few additional hours of work; and he placed the children, who called him “Tata,” father, in employment in the workshops of the popular district around Chiesa Nuova. The institution began to become firmly established when Msgr. Di Pietro rented, for the community, one floor of the Ruggia palace in Via Giulia, and Pope Pius VI subsequently rented the entire palace for the nascent hospice, which after ten years housed 90 residents. In February 1798, when Rome was occupied by the French revolutionary armies, the Ruggia palace was confiscated, and the hospice was warned either to vacate it or pay rent; but Tata Giovanni did not survive this blow, and a few months later he died suddenly of apoplexy.
His charitable institution did not, however, cease to exist: supported by the Popes and, after 1870, also by the Italian government, following various vicissitudes and changes of premises, it found its permanent location in 1926 in its own building on Viale Ardeatino outside Porta S. Paolo; and, by Royal Decree of 21 March 1935, its organic statute was approved, whereby it officially acquired the name of Istituto della S.ma Assunta and the character of an institute of vocational education.
Rosario Guido Tentori