Daughter of Pietro Betrone and Giuseppina Nirino, the owners of a bakery in Saluzzo (Cuneo) and then managers of a restaurant in Airasco (Turin), Pierina was the second of six daughters born of her father's second marriage. She was 13 years old when the Lord cast his loving gaze on her. Indeed one day the girl was hurrying to do her errands in the village when, unexpectedly, an intense, strange prayer flowed from her heart: "My God, I love you!". The unusual spiritual emotion overcame her. It was for her the meeting with the Lord. Years later, in her autobiographical notes, she recalls that experience with the simplicity and freshness of the moment, fixing it inside her for ever.
On December 8 1916, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Pierina dedicated herself to the Virgin.
Receiving Holy Communion the Divine invitation was made more explicit, for she distinctly heard within her the words "Do you want to be mine?" Deeply touched by grace, she cried and "with tears, though without understanding the extent of the question, she replied, Jesus, yes".
On February 26 1917 the Betrone family moved to Turin. Pierina was 14 years old and between family and spiritual trials, scruples and temptations and insidious and intimate sufferings she had to wait until she was 21 before being able to realize her vocation. Until then the words of the prophet in a similar story of divine seduction and salvation of the beloved, "I am going to lure her and lead her out into the wilderness and speak to her heart" (Hos. 2, 16) were uniquely true for her.
It is the inner portrait of the young Pierina. Once conquered by the Lord, she yearned for an ideal of perfection, she lived in the memory of a promise and waited for its realisation.