CARLO SALERNO. — Missionary and founder of the Sisters of Reparation, born in Milan on 22 March 1827, died there on 29 September 1870. As a cleric he took part in the barricades of 1848, then enlisted in the volunteer battalion of Lombard students (in the company of seminarians), operating at Mantua and Custoza.
Returning to the Seminary and ordained a priest, he was among the first students of the nascent Institute of Foreign Missions (1850) and departed with the first expedition (1852) for Melanesia and Micronesia, where he worked for three years, repeatedly risking his life and permanently compromising his health. Alongside his apostolate he studied the field of his work, so much so that the results of his geographical, ethnological, and religious researches were published in the *Mittheilungen* of Gotha (1862), and his collections formed the first missionary museum of the Seminary of Missions and enriched those of the Civic Museum of Milan.
Professor of English at his Seminary, he was also an indefatigable apostle, confessor, lecturer, and preacher, combining broad vision with the strictest spiritual practice and direction. In 1857–59 he established a new institution, then called the Institute of the Little Sisters of Nazareth, dedicated to the education of endangered or fallen minors, later uniting this new community with a similar one founded in Venice by the Venerable Anna Marovich. A young man of irrepressible vivacity yet of the firmest resolve, he died at barely 43 years of age and left a large body of unpublished writings on sacred oratory and spiritual direction.