Luigi Guanella was born to a Lombard mountain peasant family in the village of Fraciscio in the high valleys above Como, ordained priest in 1866, and served briefly as parish priest of Savogno (high in the Valchiavenna). In 1875 he met Don Bosco at Turin and spent three years (1875–78) as a Salesian, returning to his home diocese of Como in 1878 to apply Bosco's pastoral methods to the Lombard poor.
His distinctive apostolate centered on the integrated care of the materially poorest, the mentally disabled (an utterly neglected category in 19th-century Catholic charitable work), the physically disabled, and the abandoned elderly. He founded in 1881 the first Guanellian house at Pianello del Lario, then the major Casa San Cataldo at Como (1886), and finally — at the central institutional level — the male congregation of the Servants of Charity (Servi della Carità, 1908) and the female congregation of the Daughters of St. Mary of Providence (1872, formally constituted 1881). Both Guanellian congregations specialized from the start in the integrated care of the mentally disabled, of children with severe physical disabilities, and of the abandoned elderly — providing comprehensive lifelong residential care across a network that grew across Lombardy, Switzerland, and (by his death in 1915) the eastern United States.
He died at the Como mother-house on October 24, 1915. The Guanellian congregations today operate over 50 specialized homes for the disabled across Italy, Switzerland, the United States, and Latin America. Canonized 2011 by Benedict XVI.