A couple of years ago, as I was on my way into Rome's Stadio Olimpico on urgent football business, I bumped into Francesca, a colleague from Italian State TV, RAI. Francesca was accompanied by Gianni, a handsome seven-year-old black child, decked out in AS Roma's red and yellow.
In response to my curiosity Francesca explained that her mother, a widow, had taken on the role of foster-mother to Gianni. His mother, a Nigerian immigrant who arrived in Rome some years ago, was offered hospitality by Francesca's mother, who had come across her at the Catholic Church-run house for homeless women where she helps out most mornings.
Even though Gianni's mother now has a permanent (poorly paid) job in the northern city of Turin, she prefers to leave her child with her foster family in Rome, visiting him at weekends. Gianni is thus growing up in the relative luxury of having, de facto, two mothers.
One day Gianni and his mother may well return to Nigeria. When they do so they will owe much to the solidarity shown them by Francesca's family.
Francesca's mother is just one of a 600,000-strong army of Italian voluntary or charity workers who belong to more than 12,000 different organisations dealing with the sick, the elderly, AIDS victims, the environment, immigrants, not to mention those NGOs involved in emergency aid work in Kosovo, Burkina Faso or some other crisis-stricken country.
It is a fact of life in Italy that, as soon as a new problem breaks out (be it the 1997 earthquake in Umbria or warfare in Bosnia, Albania or Kosovo), you immediately come across someone - a colleague at work, another parent at school, the neighbour down the road - who is busy organising a lorry or a minibus to transport food, clothes and building materials to the stricken zone.
Last weekend this silent army came together for a first mega-congress in Turin. It was an occasion for exchanging ideas and experiences as young people about to head off to charity work in the Democratic Republic of Congo listened to the experience of those who give up an afternoon a week to visit patients in cancer wards up and down Italy.
In materialist Italy, beset with its often disturbing mix of public corruption and private chicanery, the volontariato (the voluntary movement) represents a welcome breath of solidarity, care and concern and one that, statistically speaking, involves one in 100 Italians.
The very size of the volontariato movement, however, can become a problem in itself. In recent years military task-force leaders in both Albania and Kosovo complained that their job had been little helped by the inadequately co-ordinated efforts of numerous Italian NGOs, all intent on addressing the same problems.
Perhaps in response to this, Social Affairs Minister Livia Turco at last weekend's congress announced the imminent creation of a public authority to oversee the whole voluntary movement. Not only would this body co-ordinate organisations and their work but it would also function as a monitor against any ad-hoc organisation that might try to abuse its voluntary status.
Furthermore, the authority would oversee the implementation of benefits ranging from tax concessions for contributors to work leave for volunteers. Ms Turco pointed out in Turin last weekend that 48 per cent of the 600,000 volontari are fully employed people who often take holidays to do their charity work.
With or without such a regulatory body, however, the work is sure to go on. An indication of that work comes from a recent publication, Una Porta Sempre Aperta (An Ever-Open Door) by Agnese Malatesta, which recounts the work of 50 volontari. Among these is Laura Perassi, a woman who spends most afternoons visiting children suffering from cancer.
"To hold a child by the hand, a child who is suffering and who may be dying, is hard, very hard. Sometimes the parents simply cannot manage and that's when voluntary workers move in."