A century is a period of time worthy of remembering. The Pontifical Institute of S. Giuseppe al Trionfale reached this beautiful goal has its headquarters in the rooms above the Pia Unione. In fact he received the authorization on 19 December 1921, almost at the beginning of parish life in the Trionfale Quarter. They were difficult years for all of Italy and tiring years especially for the city of Rome and for this neighbourhood, which had recently arisen and lacked the basic structures of civil life.
The population of the Parish was mainly made up of poor people who made ends meet with the precarious means that urban life could offer them. The Pious Union was also in its early years, but the help that came from the increasingly numerous members supported the School so as to become a center for educational aggregation.
The school building was built in 1928 under the guidance of the architect Luigi Crociani and the pastoral and educational animation of those years was the responsibility of the parish priest Don Luigi Previtali, who also received financial aid from the Vatican.
The students soon reached two hundred and from 1925 the female section was also added, located to the right of the Basilica and run by the Guanellian nuns, with the same number of girls. In those same years the neighborhood took on its current appearance, with the buildings built on the initiative of the Bank of Italy and the large fleet of the State Police.
A school inspector wrote this in a report in 1934: «In the Pontifical Schools of San Giuseppe dominates, in addition to a profound religious feeling, also a high patriotic spirit and youth and sports organizations live and thrive around them [...] This comes back to honor the reverend Fathers Servants of Charity attached to the Parish of San Giuseppe, the followers of Don Guanella in works of goodness and charity".
The period of the Second World War was a dramatic moment for the School, when the Guanellians, in addition to carrying out scholastic activities, had to help the most basic needs of the students. Don Severino Pellanda wrote in the class diary on 10 January 1944: «[I asked a student what was wrong with him and crying, in a low voice so that the others wouldn't hear him, he told me that he hadn't eaten since the day before because dad had been taken away" and mum was in bed in pain. I took him with me to the kitchen and, comforting him, I made him take something." Behind this concrete gesture of charity there was the generous help that came from the members of the Pious Union and their "drizzle", made up of many drops of goodness, formed a river of charity.
After the war and after the Italian "miracle", the school acquired the didactic physiognomy that it has maintained to this day. In the years of urban and demographic development (1960-1990) it also added a middle school section and the two-year high school year, under the guidance of the unforgettable principal Don Angelo Jannaccio.
Now it has settled into a physiognomy suited to the moment in which we live. Although fewer children, they reach two hundred in the nursery and primary school sections. The director Don Salvatore Alletto continues to guarantee the Christian pedagogical line and the Guanellian style; through the school the Parish can enter into a very close relationship with almost two hundred young families and this allows for important evangelizing action.
Looking back at these one hundred years of school life, we must be happy and also proud of the much good sown, while we hope that it will be possible to keep the lamp of children's education lit in today's Rome, so different from that of 1921, in which also transmit the words of the Gospel. And the Opera Don Guanella and also the Pious Union of Saint Joseph can be satisfied with this.