BORGI, GIOVANNI, Called Tata. - Master mason, guardian of orphans. Born in Rome on 18 Feb. 1732, died there on 28 June 1798. Most pious and burning with charity, in the hours free from his work he would go to render services to the sick of the hospital of S. Spirito. One evening in Oct. 1784, passing through the piazza del Pantheon he noticed on the paving stones, sleeping, some wretched children: moved, he carried one of them, deprived of parents and of everything, to his hovel on the ground floor of the Vicolo dei Cartari, where very soon the family of abandoned orphans, gathered by him, grew in number. To provide for the increased needs he imposed on himself a few extra hours of work; and to work, in the workshops of the popular quarter of the Chiesa Nuova, he placed the children, who called him "Tata," daddy. The institution began to consolidate, when Msgr. Di Pietro rented, for the community, a floor of the palazzo Ruggia in Via Giulia, and Pope Pius VI, subsequently, the entire palazzo for the nascent hospice, which after ten years counted 90 inmates. In Feb. 1798, Rome having been occupied by the French revolutionary armies, the palazzo Ruggia was confiscated, and the hospice was given notice to vacate or pay rent: but Tata Giovanni did not survive this blow, and a few months later he died suddenly of apoplexy.
His charitable institution, however, did not fail: it, aided by the Popes, and subsequently after 1870 also by the Italian government, after various vicissitudes and changes of location, found in 1926 its definitive arrangement in a building of its own on the Viale Ardeatino outside Porta S. Paolo, and with R. D. 21 March 1935 the approval of its organic statute, whereby it officially took the name of Istituto della S.ma Assunta and the character of Institute of professional instruction.
Bibliography
Rosario Guido Tentori