Carroll, Peter This year we Salesians of Don Bosco are celebrating 200 years since the birth of our founder, St John Bosco, and it is impossible to understand who we are now without an awareness of the circumstances within which we were born. John Bosco's life spanned a turbulent period of massive change in the city of Turin, where he founded his ministry. It was the era of the Risorgimento, when city-states and larger kingdoms were recovering from the Napoleonic invasions (...) at the turn of the century and, after a series of wars of independence, merged into the unified nation of Italy. (shrink)