He was born in Naples on 28 March 1908, the fifth of eight children. Riccardo was the most delicate and the quietest of the children. The Lombardis were a middle-class family, practising Catholics but with a touch of north-European severity and work ethic, a mix of common rules and individualism, tolerance and intransigence, religious and lay values, with a set of values adapted to leadership. Though as a young student in Naples, he talked about becoming a Jesuit, when he went to Rome to continue his studies he fell into a deep intellectual and religious crisis. During this time, thanks to his mother’s insistence, he reluctantly agreed to visit a missionary exhibition in the Vatican. It was December 1925. He saw scenes of leprosariums, hospitals, schools, under-development; it was frontier Catholicism, in Africa and Asia. It had a great impact on him. On his return home he threw himself into reading the lives of the saints, attracted especially by the life of St. Therese of the Child Jesus. He felt attuned to her, particularly in her attacks of atheism. After three tumultuous weeks, he felt called to an interior life, to contact with God; he dreamed of a contemplative life perhaps as a monk. He wrote a letter to his parents saying that he wanted to become a religious. He was aware that the call he felt had come out of the blue, violently, unexpectedly. His parents gave their permission. In March 1926, Riccardo left home and entered the Jesuit novitiate at Villa Vecchia, near Frascati. It was the eve of the Annunciation.In 1933 he graduated in philosophy and was ordained a priest in 1936. He spent two years in Florence. In March 1938, he providentially replaced his confrere Carlo Boyer for a series of conferences at the University of Padua. The lecture hall was overflowing with students and professors who drank in his words about sister/brotherhood and peace. It all started from there.