Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi and the Shadow of the Friar of Bergamo

Who this mysterious friar of Bergamo might have been remains, despite every effort, one of the riddles that have eluded me throughout this research.

After all, if even the anonymous physician who was a contemporary of Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi admitted that neither he nor his colleagues had managed to uncover the friar’s identity, one can imagine the difficulties we face some eighty years later.

Still, I will hazard a conjecture.

A few articles from Corriere della Sera in 1965 and 1966 (and Il Giorno would revisit the story in an article published in 2021) offer what may be the only references faintly consistent with our inquiry.

They spoke of a miraculous friar who, for a brief period, was active in Bergamo. His name was Carlo Doniselli, though he called himself Father Aldo of Milan, and he was credited with thaumaturgic powers.

In Bergamo, around 1965, he gained notoriety as “the Padre Pio of the North,” so much so that, according to the headlines of Corriere della Sera, “half of Bergamo was in turmoil.”

“Half of Bergamo in turmoil over the Padre Pio of the North”

— Corriere della Sera, June 11, 1965

Taken from the same article, this is a reference to the evil eye allegedly combated by Father Aldo in Bergamo, which made him unpopular with the Italian ecclesiastical authorities of the mid-nineteen sixties.

Doniselli established a home for abandoned children, Nostra Signora della Fiducia (“Our Lady of Trust”), near the residential neighborhood of Monterosso.

Yet soon he was also surrounded by “persistent rumors of healings and exorcisms” said to have followed his blessings — blessings by which, it was whispered, he delivered “souls from unusual forms of the evil eye.” For this, he eventually moved to Monza, where he resumed his work as a healer.

By January 1966, however, he was reduced to the lay state. He retained a devoted following among the sick who sought cures, and he is said never to have taken money for himself.

Now, there is no evidence that this friar of Bergamo ever produced or used any kind of oil, nor do the sources on his life predate the mid-sixties.

Therefore, there is no proof that he was practicing as a healer a full quarter-century earlier — that is, in 1939, when Cardinal Marmaggi is presumed to have conducted his inquiry and the anonymous physician to have spoken of a possible link between Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi and the mysterious friar of Bergamo.

There is also no clear trace of a link between Riccardo and Doniselli.

The only reason he enters our story at all is that, as far as we know, he is the only friar of Bergamo whose supposed miracles ever reached the pages of the national press.

However, the notion that Carlo Doniselli might have been the friar of Bergamo — the one whose miraculous oil Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi is said to have dispensed from his practice in Via Sistina in 1939 — is undermined by a piece of evidence (see above).

It surfaces only on Google Books, and even there its provenance is questionable. A fragment of it is reproduced above.

In tracing Doniselli’s biography, the text insists he first appeared in Bergamo six years before 1965, which would place his arrival no earlier than 1959. By that logic, he could hardly have been the “miraculous” friar of Bergamo two decades earlier.