The Nun in Tweeds

No one would have suspected that the small, well-tailored woman with blue-rinsed grey hair and smart, blue-framed spectacles was a nun, or, for that matter, that she was an American. Mother Mary Dominic Ramacciotti regards her occasional social round of luncheons, teas and receptions in Rome as the hard part of her work. This week she was back at the "easier" part: putting in an 18-hour day building an Italian Girls' Town.

Though she has an ancient Tuscan name, spry, sixtyish Mary Ramacciotti was born and bred in Baltimore. She joined the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Baltimore while still in her teens, stayed on to teach. Romance languages, eventually became dean of Notre Dame of Maryland college. Her present project began in 1955, when she met a bouncy, bustling Irish priest named Monsignor John Patrick Carroll-Abbing, a man with a well-known mission--"Boys' Towns" for Italy. During fund-raising drives for his boys, one question bothered him: What about the girls? When he met Mother Mary, who by then had joined the faculty of Washington's Catholic University of America, Carroll-Abbing decided that he had found the answer. "It was a clear case," he says, "of the right person at the right time for the right job."

In the Mirror. Within a few months, Mother Mary was off to Italy, soon became director of Italy's unborn Girls' Town. With her meager funds Mother Mary spent two years searching for the right site. She settled on a tiny hamlet called Borgata Ottavia, near Rome, built a dormitory-schoolhouse. Later she added a simple modern chapel, which was formally inaugurated last week.

At the outset, Mother Mary faced the question of what age the girls should be. She decided that adolescents are "the youngsters who are least understood and who need guidance most. Everyone loves to play with a cute and docile baby, but teen-agers are too often unwanted." Last fall Mother Mary welcomed to Girls' Town 16 ragged, frightened orphan girls from institutions all over Italy. They looked in wonder at the pink exterior walls, the brightly painted rooms ("Colored paint costs no more than white, and it's much more cheerful"). One girl exclaimed at the sight of a mirror on the wall: "We were never allowed mirrors in the orphans' home!" Mother Mary quickly replied: "I want you to have mirrors and I want you to look at yourself. When you don't look at yourself, it isn't you who suffers--it's the person who has to look at you."

Not Crickets. Purpose of the five-year course is to train the girls to support themselves as governesses, social workers, children's counselors and above all to be confident women who "know how to grace a home." Courses include Italian literature, history, geography, science, mathematics, French. English and religion (the last two taught by Mother Mary herself).

Mother Mary decided early that the nun's habit she had been wearing all her life would set up too much of a barrier between herself and the girls, got special permission from the Vatican to wear secular clothes. Many of her simple, tweedy outfits are homemade, and she wears no lipstick or jewelry, even on her fund-raising expeditions into Roman society. But some of the shocked villagers of Borgata Ottavia imaginatively endow her with mink coats and painted fingernails. "What will she make of those girls?" asked one indignant woman of the neighborhood last week. "Not good mammas, I'm sure." Nodded another: "The girls will all end up with crickets in their heads --thanks to the rich American woman."

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