Piero Angela’s nurse was from Valchiusella

Her name was Pierina Provagna. In the 1930s she worked as a nurse in the Villa Turina nursing home, run by Piero Angela’s father. The woman died in 1996 and is buried in the Alice Superiore cemetery

VAL DI CHY. Piero Angela’s nurse rests in the cemetery of Alice Superiore, a fraction of the Municipality of Val di Chy. She died in 1996 at the Ivrea hospital, her name was Pierina Provagna. In the 1930s Pierina worked as a nurse in the neuropsychiatric care home Villa Turina, in San Maurizio Canavese, directed at that time by Piero’s father, Carlo Angela, so much so that the street on which the structure is located was then named just to Carlo Angela. Piero’s parents often entrusted the little creature to the attention of the nurse who looked after her by feeding her and making her play. Pierina became so fond of the future television journalist and science communicator so much that when their destinies separated, she never forgot that little frugoletto that she held in her arms and on her knees. And with every television appearance of Piero Angela, she was moved. She had also launched more than one appeal through the newspapers, hoping that someone would help her connect with the one who had meanwhile become one of the most popular faces on television. Pierina when, in the months preceding her death, she was a guest at Alice’s nursing home, she told everyone that her dream, before leaving, would be to embrace Piero Angela again. Unfortunately she did not go that way. Her life had subjected Pierina to severe tests. She was very young, she lost her husband and a daughter, while she had no news of her son who remained to her. The never-lamented Bernardo Bovis, in his 1999 literary work “Addio Valchiusella – Magic of a valley in the heart”, rummaged through Pierina Provagna’s thoughts, writing: “And that other” son “that I considered such even though I had not generated him but on which I poured all my attentions … although I have become a famous person and on the crest of the wave he will find the time and the way to come up here to lay a flower and recite a prayer in front of the place where my remains lie waiting that the angelic trumpet awakens them from the sleep that has caught them stopping the beating of my heart, a heart that has trembled so much, loved so much and suffered so much? ».