Luigi Orione was born to a small Lombard street-paver's family at Pontecurone — a village near the boundary between Lombardy and Piedmont. At thirteen he entered the Salesians of Don Bosco at Turin (1885) and met Don Bosco personally three years before Bosco's death. He left the Salesians for health reasons in 1889 at sixteen, entered the diocesan seminary of Tortona, and was ordained priest in 1895 at twenty-three.
Already at sixteen, while still a Tortona seminarian, he had founded a small free oratory for boys in the diocese — the seed of what became the Sons of Divine Providence (Orionine Fathers), formally constituted in 1903 with diocesan approval and papal approval in 1909. The Orionine charism — modelled deliberately on Don Bosco's preventive-system pedagogy but adapted to the early 20th-century Italian rural Catholic crisis — focused on the integrated care of orphaned, abandoned, disabled, and impoverished children. He founded a parallel women's congregation (the Little Missionary Sisters of Charity) in 1915, and a contemplative branch (the Adorers, also called the Sisters Sacramentine) in the 1920s.
His major public-relief work came after the catastrophic earthquake of Messina (December 28, 1908, ~80,000 deaths) and the Marsica earthquake of January 1915 (~30,000 deaths). In both cases Orione personally led teams of Orionine religious into the disaster zones for months of relief work; the Pope (in 1908 Pius X, in 1915 Benedict XV) entrusted to him the official Catholic Church relief coordination — the largest Italian Catholic disaster relief efforts of the early 20th century. He died at the Liguria coastal town of Sanremo on March 12, 1940. Canonized 2004.