Antonietta Meo — Nennolina to her family — hurt her knee at five, and the bruise that would not heal was osteosarcoma. Her left leg was amputated in 1936. She learned to walk on an artificial one, went back to school, and in the last year of her life dictated and wrote more than a hundred letters, which her mother found and kept: letters to Jesus, to the Father, to the Holy Spirit, to Our Lady, which she would leave under a statue in the house as though posting them.
They are the letters of a small child and they are not sentimental. She asks for her leg back. She says she is glad of the illness because it lets her give something. She writes about suffering as a currency she can spend on other people, in the spelling of a six-year-old. Her father remembered her saying, after the amputation, that she was glad Jesus had given her this so that she might be dearest to him.
She died on 3 July 1937. Benedict XVI declared her Venerable on 17 December 2007, and the argument her cause had to settle was whether a child that young could exercise heroic virtue at all — the answer that was given is yes, and it is the reason her name matters beyond her family. She lies in the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, in the church of the relics of the Passion, which is a fitting address for her.