«Tra gli uomini insigni che di tanto lustro circondarono il nome del clero bergamasco». Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli e san Luigi Maria Palazzolo

[Autom. eng. transl.] The study reconstructs what significance the priest Luigi Maria Palazzolo had in the life of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, an authentic model of a social priest from Bergamo who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, spent his entire existence in the care of young people, dying in 1886 in the smell of holiness. In particular, within a volume that dissects the intertwining of holiness, theology and pastoral care in Roncalli's human and spiritual maturation, it focuses on his figure as the archetype of the Bergamo priest, heir, modern interpreter and, one could almost say, authentic fulfillment of the Tridentine reform. His presence in the daily religious experience of the diocese shows how much Roncalli, since the Seminary and even more during the years of ministry in Bergamo, has absorbed and historicized this model of sanctity, a sacramental dress that he wore even after leaving the Orobic city, until pontificate. In this sense, his teaching was more relevant than that of other great names of spirituality, Italian and otherwise, such as Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Giovanni Maria Vianney. It was John XXIII who unblocked Palazzolo's beatification process, thus valorising Bergamo's sanctity, with its purely social traits, as a gift to the universal Church.