Shoemaker until 50.
Conventual Friar Minor, doorkeeper at
St Francis' in Brescia (Italy)
for the following 30 years.
Servant of God, on the way to beatification.

Born in Corticelle Pieve (Brescia - Italy) on 29th January 1879, when eleven he moved to Brescia with his family. His father died in 1892, leaving his wife with five young children. Giacomo began to work in a shoemaker's shop. He grew up generous and well liked, fond of his family and careful in his duties. He was 18 when his mother died. Without a guide he was led into a wretched life by bad gangs. He left his religious observances, became idle, dissatisfied with himself, unpleasant.

On Immaculate day 1913, he lived the experience of conversion. He had long been regretting that kind of life so different from his youth ideals.
On 8th December 1913 in the Sanctuary of the Virgin in Corticelle he recovered the grace and the vigour to follow Jesus.

He lived in Brescia as a perfect laic model for 15 more years, devoted to his shoemaker work and as a witness of a strong faith. He used to begin every day praying for three hours in Saint John's. He cooperated with the curate of the Parish church and at home he gathered and taught children that didn't attend the church. He loved the poor and gave them everything he didn't strictly need. He was really familiar with the most engaged Christians of that time in Brescia: Don Giovanni Battista Zuaboni (Servant of God), Giacomo Montini and his son Giovanni Battista Montini who later became Pope Paolo VI, Don Giovanni Pè....

At the age of 50 he entered the monastery of St Francis in Brescia and became "Grey Friar".
He was charged with the monastery lodge where he worked for thirty years. He used to receive the beggars patiently and smiling. Always mending the friars' and beggars' shoes, he carried out every task with extraordinary zeal and fidelity. He had the gift of a deep prayer: that was the secret of his religious life. He lived in an absolute obedience to his Superiors, he was quite reserved, always asking to be the least of all, satisfied to serve with humility in the Virgin's style, who he was very fond of. Only after his death, the mystic nature of his spirituality was brought to light.

Friar Giacomo wrote his interior experience and meditation which associate him to the mystic, in diaries written in obedience to the Superiors. The language is simple and typical of a man of little education.

He spent last years of his life in his cell, he was invalid at the mercy of discomforts of a man of almost ninety.

He died on the evening of the 27th January 1967 and was buried in the town Cemetery. A diocesan process to gather the writings and memories of his life and virtues began on 17th November 1989. Once the diocesan research was completed, in 1991 the whole evidence was transferred to the competent Congregation in Rome.

Friar Giacomo's body was moved and buried in St Francis' in Brescia, on the evening of the 28th April 1994. Since then his tomb has become the place of pilgrimage for lots of believers who try to conform to Jesus.