“I have always enjoyed my work.”
Sister Maria Agnese is born in 1922 under the name Alessandra Squizzato in Trebaseleghe, in the province of Padua, Italy. She is the youngest of five daughters in a Catholic farming family with ten children.
After secondary school, Alessandra has to interrupt her studies, although she wishes to continue them. The family is poor and needs her help on the farm. From a young age, she suffers from serious health problems. She undergoes several surgeries, including one on her spine at the age of 15, which will deeply mark her life.
Religion plays a central role in her family. Every morning, young Alessandra goes to Mass and visited the nuns in the village. She remembers hours of prayer and a youth profoundly shaped by faith. After the war, the lay association Catholic Action offers many activities for young girls. Alessandra gladly takes part, but she feels that her path will be different. “We wanted to make ourselves pretty to meet boys,” she recalls, laughing, “but I had other desires.”
At 16, she leaves Italy to enter the convent in Bellinzona, the Santa Maria Institute, where Alessandra becomes Sister Maria Agnese. She trains as a seamstress and works in ironing and laundry. Because of her back pain, she later devotes herself to teaching.
Sister Maria Agnese earns a diploma to teach at the higher school of sewing and settles in Biasca, where she works from 1950 to 1995. For more than 40 years, she teaches young women there and also becomes head of the community of the Sisters of the Holy Cross of Menzingen. She keeps fond memories of that time and speaks affectionately of “her girls.” Sister Maria Agnese is a strict but caring teacher: it is important to her that each of her students earned her diploma.
In 1995, at the age of 73, she joins the Carmelo Santa Teresa Institute in Brione sopra Minusio. Although the religious habit has not been mandatory since the 1970s, Sister Maria Agnese remaines faithful to it: she is the last member of her congregation in Switzerland still wearing the long robe and veil, always carefully ironed, as she wishes.
With her walker, she moves around the house on her own. She takes part in the institute’s activities until the age of 101: in gymnastics classes, cooking groups, and of course in daily Mass. Only her reduced hearing capacity prevents her from being even more active in community life.