In those eyes you perceive the immensity and the transparency of your Paradise, bright, unmistakeable, serene, alight and yet moved to tears. Such are the eyes of one who loves, the beauty of one who conceals within him the unfathomable depths of the Spirit who accepts everything and excludes nothing.

Gioacchino had the gift of being able to express his deepest experiences in verse.

He had only lived for 36 years - but they were years lived with a rare intensity. Born in Gela, Sicily, into a well-to-do family, he was educated in Catholic schools.
When he was about 15, he had a crisis. He describes it in his own words:
"I wanted to find my own space, so I started to mix with other groups of people. I felt a profound sense of dissatisfaction and was constantly looking for something. I loved freedom too much and so I joined in with everybody and nobody. In fact, being with my friends was more a matter of habit than anything deeper. I felt very empty inside."

The summer of 1980 marked the beginning of a change in his life. He found himself, against his wishes, at a Mariapolis, the summer gathering of the Focolare Movement. In fact he had been practically dragged there by his mother and sister, but one thing in particular left a deep impression on him:
"That group of people let me touch a way of loving that I had never come across before. I didn’t believe that you could love everyone, beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant, used as I was to making distinctions between one person and another. I really was shaken by this. The interesting thing was that I experienced a freedom and a transparency which, for the first time in my life, not only got me involved, but opened up new horizons to me. And, as I wanted to get to know humanity from the inside, I felt that I had been offered an incredible opportunity to contemplate the mystery of God who is in every human being - because that richness that is each person had been brought into the light".

Having successfully completed his High School exams, Gioacchino decided to go to university in Florence to study Political Science.
All sorts of things there caught his interest, but it was when a girl confided in him that she wanted to commit suicide because she did not want to continue with an existence which had no meaning, that made him decide to take living the Gospel seriously.
"Faced with such immense desolation I was petrified and I thought about my own existence and about that God-Love who, in some way at least, I had discovered. The first thing that came into my head in front of that girl was my inability to relieve her suffering. From that moment, I decided to try and love everyone. My neighbour’s suffering belonged to me, because I wanted to dry it up."
That girl rediscovered hope.

From then on all his relationships changed, starting with those at home, then on the train, in the street and in his lodgings. Living those words of the Gospel: ‘whatever you did to the least you did to me’ "became fixed in my head. I tried to see him in everyone, loving him however he presented himself to me. At the end of the day I had a peace I had never experienced before, and a special joy.
Even the most banal things of every day, like washing the dishes, or sweeping the floor, become extraordinary and become important." Then Gioacchino fell in love with a girl, but after three years they broke off their engagement.
"It was a very painful cut. It was like being robbed of one’s most precious possession. I asked myself why. I didn’t understand anything any more and I felt a darkness within me."

But then he started to live the Gospel with even more enthusiasm.
"I felt that that cut led me to love more. There are plenty of people out there who are looking for a bit of love."
Then something new happened:
"Something extraordinary happened next: I felt that my response to God’s love was not enough. I was afraid that I was not responding to it. But I was certain of one thing: that God loves me immensely and that he created me free. This freedom struck me particularly in the focolarini who leave everything for God. Although I wanted, with all my heart, to get married and have a family, I saw that God was opening my eyes to this freedom. I decided to risk everything for everything, for one reason only: to love God above all else and to love humanity wherever he wanted me to be."

Shortly afterwards he spent some time in the little towns of the Focolare at Loppiano in Italy and at Montet, in Switzerland, and later in the Focolare centre in Santiago, Chile. In 1992 he returned to Italy, to the Focolare centre at Cuneo. "Here I met many, many people and I experienced, on many occasions, the hundredfold that Jesus promises to whomever leaves father, mother, sisters, children and fields, in order to follow him."

In the summer of 1994 he is diagnosed as having a malignant tumour. That evening he wrote in his diary: "You have come to me Jesus and I want to celebrate your arrival. I am here. I want to love you..."
"In the depth of my soul, even though I was in a state of suspension, the peace and strength I had begun to feel as never before, were stronger."
There then followed a number of operations, and added to his physical sufferings there was a spiritual trial:

Darkness in the soul. This morning dense blackness. Darkness. The Father’s house, Peaks, precipices, intense pain, doubts invade you and you offer your Mass once more. Deserted fields, immense glaciers where the soul feels smashed, annihilated. My God, why? You return hoping that the glare or better the lightning flashes of the night may illuminate your soul again. Only one way, only one note: to love my neighbour...

After the final operation last July, Gioacchino was in constant dialogue with Chiara. When the physical pain became greater, Chiara helped him to live always and only the present, forgetting the past, "because if we accumulate in our memory all that we have suffered, we can’t even tolerate the present."
On another occasion she reminded him that "the true reality isn’t in seeing the illness, the human circumstances: it is more true to believe that God has laid out everything with his love." Gioacchino shared everything, meetings with the focolarini, sufferings, with the reality that everything is Love, Love with a capital "L", everything is God’s will.

On 16 October he wrote in his diary: "Ciao Jesus. Yesterday I told the focolarini how, when visiting you in the tabernacle where you are waiting for me, I had a clear idea: Gio, always be happy, I am with you always."
At the beginning of November the situation worsened. He was taken into hospital where, on the afternoon of 5 November there was a sudden decline. He made his confession and received the Sacrament of the Sick.
He was cheerful and luminous... He knew that his time had come: "OK! OK!..," and his last words were: "for You, Jesus."
In May he had written in his diary: "When that moment will arrive for me, I really want it to be a celebration, on earth as it is in Heaven."