Why Versi?
The Name
Versi is the Italian word for verses — the lines of Scripture, poetry, and great literature that this app helps you commit to heart. The name also echoes Verso L'Alto, the motto of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, which means “Toward the Heights.” Just as memorizing great texts elevates the mind and soul, Frassati's life was a constant ascent toward holiness lived in the everyday.
Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901–1925)
Pier Giorgio Frassati was born in Turin, Italy, to a wealthy and prominent family — his father founded the newspaper La Stampa and later served as Italy's ambassador to Germany. Despite every comfort available to him, Pier Giorgio chose a life of radical generosity. As a university student studying mining engineering, he gave away his bus fare to the poor and walked home instead, spent his allowance on medicine and food for the sick, and carried furniture up flights of stairs for families who had nothing. He was a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and quietly visited the poorest neighborhoods of Turin, often arriving home late with empty pockets and a full heart.
Frassati was no somber ascetic. He was an avid mountaineer, a practical joker among his wide circle of friends, a passionate political voice against Fascism, and a young man of infectious joy. His friends called their hiking group I Tipi Loschi — “The Shady Characters” — and it was on one of their alpine excursions that he scrawled his famous motto Verso L'Alto on the back of a photograph: toward the heights, both the mountain summit and the summit of the soul. He attended daily Mass, prayed the Rosary faithfully, and maintained a deep Eucharistic devotion, yet he wore his holiness so lightly that even his family did not fully grasp the depth of his spiritual life until after his death.
In the summer of 1925, at just twenty-four years old, Pier Giorgio contracted polio — likely from the sick he had been visiting — and died within days. His family was astonished when thousands of mourners, most of them the poor and forgotten of Turin, filled the streets for his funeral. They had known a side of him his own parents had barely seen. Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1990, calling him “the man of the eight Beatitudes” and proposing him as a model for young people everywhere. His cause for canonization continues, and he remains one of the most beloved figures in modern Catholic life — a saint for ordinary people who want to live joyfully, serve generously, and always climb higher.