Flora Gualdani, the woman who created the first home for single mothers

Flora Gualdani , who passed away on August 16, 2026, at the age of 88, is a woman who will never be forgotten. With extraordinary passion and immense courage, in the early 1960s, she created the first shelter providing assistance and care to single mothers and women who were alone and abandoned while still pregnant.

Flora was born in 1938 and is originally from the Arezzo area. From a young age, she chose to become a midwife; in 1955, in Florence , she delivered her first child, and from then on she worked for about forty years in hospitals across Tuscany.

But the turning point in her life came in 1964. During a trip to the Holy Land, entering the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Flora had what she considered a powerful insight into the need to defend and support motherhood. Returning to work at the hospital, she met a young woman with cancer and pregnant , who had decided not to abort despite the pressure she was under. Gualdani assisted her during her pregnancy and, after the birth, took the newborn into her home so that the mother could receive treatment.

That little girl was, according to Gualdani herself, the first of a long series . In the following years, she began to welcome abandoned newborns and women with problematic pregnancies into her home. When, in the 1970s, requests from single mothers and pregnant women in difficulty increased, her home was no longer sufficient. She therefore used her share of her father's inheritance to build small houses on land near Arezzo to accommodate difficult pregnancies . Thus was born Casa Betlemme, which she described as a small "field hospital."

An important feature is that Gualdani went beyond material assistance : she collaborated pro bono with social services, pediatrics, the Juvenile Court, and other organizations, and also developed intensive training programs on fertility and motherhood. Throughout her life, she also served in several countries (including, during wartime, Bosnia, Cambodia, and India), especially where she encountered women and children in particularly vulnerable situations.

Over the course of its life, more than 5 babies have been born at Casa Betlemme . Lives saved, not wasted.

Cover photo from the Casa Betlemme Facebook page

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• Let's Barattoliamo, the Mama Kreis association's project to avoid waste and save money