Ernesto Olivero

On his 24th birthday, on 24 May 1964, he founded Sermig (Servizio Missionario Giovani) together with his wife Maria Cerrato, whom he had met organizing the “Giornate Mossionarie Mondiali”, and with some friends that he was meeting weekly at home.

Even though the cultural climate pushed many Catholics at the time to support Gospel with Marx’s writings, Sermig volunteers wanted to position themselves as “simple Christians” without any political affiliation.

In that period, the group raised founds and organized exhibitions, markets and benefit concerts with Nomadi, Al Bano and Romina Power, Adriano Celentano and others, with sometimes a big public response.

In particular, on February 23, 1969, Olivero and the other Sermig activists managed to fill the urin for a concert by Celentaro, when, at that time, Celentano never had had a bigger audience than 3.000.

[2][3] On 2 August 1983 Olivero took over the management, after years of requests to the municipality of Turin, of a part of the structures of the old military arsenal located in the district of Borgo Dora, one of the infamous neighborhoods in town.

[4] From that time, the Arsenal defined itself as a “metropolitan monastery“ and gave assistance to immigrants, drug addicts, alcoholics, AIDS patients and homeless.

Mother Teresa, John Paul II and Italians such as Norberto Bobbio and Giovanni Agnelli and foreign religious and secular personalities have repeatedly nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

[15] During an festival by Avvenire, held on 1 August 2018 in Lerici, he received the prize “Angelo Narducci” from Luigi Ernesto Palletti, bishop of La Spezia-Sarzana-Brugnato, in occasion of the 35th anniversary of the foundation of Peace Arsenal.